The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability 1138043605, 9781138043602

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND DISABILITY

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability brings together some of the most influential and important contemporary perspectives in this growing field. The book traces the history of the field and locates literary disability studies in the wider context of activism and theory. It introduces debates about definitions of disability and explores intersectional approaches in which disability is understood in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity. Divided broadly into sections according to literary genre, this is an important resource for those interested in exploring and deepening their knowledge of the field of literature and disability studies. Alice Hall teaches in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has previously worked at the University of Nottingham and the University of Paris (III and VII). Alice is the author of Disability and Modern Fiction: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature (2012) and Literature and Disability: Contemporary Critical Thought (2015).

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ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS TO LITERATURE Also available in this series: The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities Edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature Edited by John Stephens, with Celia Abicalil Belmiro, Alice Curry, Li Lifang and Yasmine S. Motawy The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-​Meibauer The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History Edited by May Hawas The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing Edited by Aroosa Kanwal and Saiyma Aslam The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics Edited by Matt Seybold and Michelle Chihara The Routledge Companion to Twenty-​First Century Literary Fiction Edited by Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies Edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung and Takayuki Tatsumi The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature Edited by Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities Edited by Paul Crawford, Brian Brown and Andrea Charise The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction Edited by Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Andrew Pepper The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma Edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​literature/​series/​RC4444

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND DISABILITY

Edited by Alice Hall

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First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Alice Hall; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Alice Hall to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Hall, Alice (Literature professor), editor. Title: The Routledge companion to literature and disability/edited by Alice Hall. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019057593 | ISBN 9781138043602 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315173047 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Disabilities in literature. Classification: LCC PN56.D553 R68 2020 | DDC 809/.933561–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057593 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​04360-​2  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​17304-​7  (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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CONTENTS

List of figures  List of contributors  Acknowledgements 

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Introduction to The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability  Alice Hall PART I

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New directions in the field 

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1 Disability in Indigenous literature  Siobhan Senier

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2 Disability in black speculative fiction  Sami Schalk

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3 t4t: toward a crip ethics of trans literary criticism  Cameron Awkward-​Rich

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4 Challenging phonocentrism: writing signs and bilingual Deaf literatures  43 Kristen Harmon 5 “Here there be monsters”: mapping novel representations of the relationship between disability and monstrosity in recent graphic narratives and comic books  Chris Foss

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6 Spectrality, strangeness, and stigmaphilia: Gothic and critical disability studies  Sara Wasson 7 Contemporary horror and disability: adaptations and active readers  Petra Kuppers PART II

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Novels and short stories 

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8 From “changelings” to “libtards”: intellectual disability in the eighteenth century and beyond  D. Christopher Gabbard

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9 Crip gothic: affiliations of disability and queerness in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)  Jason S. Farr

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10 “Of wonderful use to everyone”: disability and the marriage plot in the nineteenth-​century novel  Clare Walker  Gore

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11 Afro-​modernism and black disability studies  Jess Waggoner 12 “What’s the matter with him?”: intellectual disability, Jewishness, and stereotype in Bernard Malamud’s “Idiots First”  Howard Sklar 13 Metaphorical medicine: disability in Anglophone Indian fiction  Stephanie Yorke 14 Disability and contemporary literature: antinormative narratives of embodiment  David T. Mitchell PART III

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Poetry 

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15 Poet and beggar: Edmund White’s Blindness  Vanessa Warne

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16 Deafness and modernism  Rebecca Sanchez

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17 The “fury of loving joyfully”: Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations  Elizabeth Leake

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18 Getting there: pain poetics and Canadian literature  Shane Neilson

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19 Disability in contemporary poetry  Johanna Emeney

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20 Disability poetry: testing the waters of definition  Michael Northen

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PART IV

Drama 

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21 Canadian disability dramaturgies  Kirsty Johnston

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22 Disability and the American stage musical  Samuel Yates

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23 Of scapeghosts and men: Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes and the politics of learning disability  Anna Harpin 24 Disability, drama, and the problem of intersectional invisibility  Ann M. Fox 25 Puppets, players and the poetics of vulnerability: Hijinx’s Meet Fred and new directions in the theatres of learning disability  Matt Hargrave PART V

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Life writing 

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26 Sex, death, and the welfare check: rhythms of disability and sexuality in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives  Leon J. Hilton

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27 Disability narrative, embodied aesthetics and cross-​media arts  Stella Bolaki

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28 A grammar of touch: interdependencies of person, place, thing  Shannon Walters

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29 Psychographics: graphic memoirs and psychiatric disability  Elizabeth J. Donaldson

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30 Challenging the neurotypical: autism, contemporary literature, and digital textualities  Hannah Tweed

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Index 

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FIGURES

6.1 Deborah Padfield with Patrick Dixon from Deborah Padfield (2003) Perceptions of Pain. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing: p80. © Deborah Padfield, reproduced by kind permission of Dewi Lewis.  6.2 Deborah Padfield with Nell Keddie from Deborah Padfield (2003) Perceptions of Pain. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing: p119. © Deborah Padfield, reproduced by kind permission of Dewi Lewis.  6.3 Deborah Padfield with Nell Keddie from Deborah Padfield (2003) Perceptions of Pain. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing: p115. © Deborah Padfield, reproduced by kind permission of Dewi Lewis.  12.1 Archetype of intellectual disability.  23.1 “Brotherly Doubles” in Dead Man’s Shoes, dir. Shane Meadows, Warp Films (2004).  23.2 “Brotherly Doubles” in Dead Man’s Shoes, dir. Shane Meadows, Warp Films (2004).  23.3 “Sonny” in Dead Man’s Shoes, dir. Shane Meadows, Warp Films (2004).  23.4 “Gypsy John” dead on the toilet in Dead Man’s Shoes, dir. Shane Meadows, Warp Films (2004).  23.5 Murdered “Tuff ” stuffed in a suitcase in Dead Man’s Shoes, dir. Shane Meadows, Warp Films (2004).  27.1 Alison Stewart, Fabricback Novel (2010). Image by Egidija Čiricaitė.  27.2 Deborah Humm, The Variance,Vagaries and Extreme Randomness of MS (2015). Image by Egidija Čiricaitė.  27.3 HOAX My Lonely Heart. Writer: Ravi Thornton © 2014. Director (theatre): Benji Reid. Director (film): John Grey. Stills credit: John Grey © 2017. Actors: Christopher Tendai playing Rob, Danny Solomon playing The Condition. Producer: Ziggy’s Wish Ltd.  27.4 HOAX Psychosis Blues. Page 39, First Edition. Page 35, Second Edition. Author: Ravi Thornton © 2014. Illustrator: Karrie Fransman © 2014. Chapter: A Desolate Spot. Publisher: Ziggy’s Wish Ltd.  ix

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27.5 HOAX Our Right to Hope. Writer: Ravi Thornton © 2017. Co-​writer: Laura Harper. Illustrator: Andrew Chiu. Producer: Ziggy’s Wish Ltd.  29.1 Binky Brown, panel from page 2. Description: Binky walks down the sidewalk past a car and says to himself, “At least nuthin’ bad happened to Mom!” Meanwhile, in a thought bubble above his head, he imagines a car running over his mother’s body and a loud “CRUNCH” sound.  29.2 Binky Brown, panel from page 7. Binky opens a door and sees a naked woman, clutching at her breast, saying “Yurk Yokka Yokka Ig.” In the background a nurse says, “Close that door, you!”  29.3 “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” title panel. Description: a drawn hand holds a photograph of Art Spiegelman as a child with his mother who is wearing a bathing suit, captioned “Trojan Lake, N.Y., 1958.” Next to the photo, the title text reads: “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History.”  29.4 Marbles, page 182. Description: Top of page reads, “From my diagnosis in January 1998 until that point in March 2002, I had taken:” followed by three sections illustrating Forney’s experiences with Klonopin, Lithium, and Depakote. The next page, not included here, is a continuation that illustrates Forney’s experiences with Celexa, Neurontin, and Zyprexa.  29.5 Rx, n.p. Description: Two sheep carrying briefcases walk into an office building labeled Pfizer. A wolf wearing sheep’s clothing, also carrying a briefcase, follows. At the top of the page, the title “Passing” appears in large letters. 

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CONTRIBUTORS

Cameron Awkward-​Rich is Assistant Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work can be found in Signs, American Quarterly, Transgender Studies Quarterly and elsewhere. Also a poet, he is the author of two collections –​ Dispatch (2019) and Sympathetic Little Monster (2016), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary award. Stella Bolaki is Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities in the School of English at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Illness as Many Narratives:  Arts, Medicine and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). She has published widely in journals such as Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies and Mosaic. She is the director of Kent’s postgraduate programme in Medical Humanities. Elizabeth J.  Donaldson is Professor of English and Associate Dean at New York Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses in American literature and directs the Medical Humanities minor program. Her edited books include The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (2012) and Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health (2018). She is currently at work on a monograph which focuses on collaborations and literary exchanges among American writers and psychiatrists. Johanna Emeney read English Literature and Oriental Studies at Cambridge. She went on to teach senior school English literature in both England and her native New Zealand for twelve years, and then gained her PhD at Massey University, Auckland, where she has worked as a senior tutor in creative writing for nine years. Jo has published two collections of poetry (Apple & Tree, Cape Catley, 2011, and Family History, Mākaro Press, 2017), as well as an academic book called The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities (ibidem Press, 2018). Jason S.  Farr is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University. His book, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-​Century British Literature, was published by Bucknell University Press in 2019. His research appears in venues such as Eighteenth-​Century Fiction, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. His

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public-​facing writing on accessibility, disability and queer kinship can be found at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Profession, The Rambling and elsewhere. Chris Foss is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, where he specializes in Nineteenth-​Century British Literature, with a secondary emphasis on Disability Studies. He served as the lead editor for Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, published by Palgrave’s Literary Disability series in 2016, and is currently working on a new book project tentatively entitled The Importance of Being Different:  Intersectional Disability and Emotional Response in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales. Ann M. Fox is Professor of English at Davidson College, where she specializes in modern and contemporary drama, literary and cultural disability studies, and graphic medicine. A recipient of multiple fellowships, her scholarship on disability and theater has been published widely; she has also co-​curated four disability-​related visual arts exhibitions. Her current project is entitled Adaptive Activism: How Disability Refigures the Cultural Landscape. D. Christopher Gabbard is Professor of English at the University of North Florida, where he teaches courses in British Enlightenment literature, critical disability studies, and creative nonfiction. He is the author of A Life Beyond Reason: A Father’s Memoir (Beacon, 2019) and the co-​editor of A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2019). He is editing a collection of critical essays focusing on representations of caregiving in literature and popular media. Clare Walker Gore read English at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where she wrote her PhD thesis on disability in Victorian fiction. She currently holds a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and her first book, Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-​Century Novel, published in 2019 with Edinburgh University Press. She is currently pursuing a project on life writing by and about female novelists in the nineteenth century. Matt Hargrave is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne. His overarching research interest is human vulnerability:  how acts of performance redefine the terms of engagement with vulnerability and establish new generative modes of understanding. He is the author of Theatres of Learning Disability: Good, Bad or Plain Ugly? (Palgrave, 2015) and is currently working on a project about the role of stand-​up comedy in mental health education. Kristen Harmon is Professor of English at Gallaudet University, a bilingual ASL-​English university, in Washington, D.C. Born deaf and mainstreamed, Kristen immersed herself in the Deaf community and learned American Sign Language (ASL) as a young adult. She has published essays, short stories, and non-​fiction, and she is co-​editor of a series of books on Deaf American prose, published at Gallaudet University Press. Anna Harpin is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research examines the cultural histories of madness and trauma. Her recent publications include Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness (Routledge, 2018) and ‘Broadmoor Performed: A Theatrical Hospital’ in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Alongside her academic work she works as a theatre writer and director with her company, Idiot Child. xii

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Leon J. Hilton is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University. His work focuses on modern and contemporary theatre and performance, with particular attention to the way these fields overlap with disability studies and neurodiversity, queer theory, critical race studies and psychoanalysis. His research has been published in GLQ, Third Text, African American Review, The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and TDR/​The Drama Review. Kirsty Johnston, Associate Professor in the University of British Columbia Department of Theatre and Film, researches intersections between disability, theatre and performance. Her Queen’s University Press, books include Stage Turns:  Canadian Disability Theatre (McGill-​ 2012) and Recasting Modernism: Disability Theatre and Modern Drama (Bloomsbury, 2016). The latter includes a critical section featuring the work of disability performance scholars/​activists Michael Davidson, Ann M. Fox, Terry Galloway, M. Shane Grant, Ben Gunter, Carrie Sandahl and Jenny Sealey. Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a professor at the University of Michigan. She leads The Olimpias, an international performance research collective. Her most recent monograph, Theatre & Disability (2017), offers a snapshot of the field. Her previous monographs engaged disability performance, medicine and contemporary arts, and community performance. She is the author of a dark fantasy collection, Ice Bar (2018). Her most recent poetry collection is the ecosomatic Gut Botany (2020). Elizabeth Leake is Professor of Italian at Columbia University, where she teaches courses on twentieth-​century narrative, theatre and cinema. Her books include The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone (2003), After Words: Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth-​Century Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2011)  and Tex Willer:  Un cowboy nell’Italia del dopoguerra (Il Mulino, 2018). With Piero Garofalo and Dana Renga, she co-​authored Internal Exile in Fascist Italy (Manchester University Press, 2019). David T. Mitchell is Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches Disability Studies, Cultural Theory, and American Literature. With Sharon L.  Snyder, he has written and edited a number of books including The Body and Physical Difference:  Discourses of Disability (1997), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), The Encyclopedia of Disability (vol. 5): A History of Disability in Primary Sources (2005) and Cultural Locations of Disability (2006). His most recent book, The Biopolitics of Disability:  Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (2015), analyzes crip/​queer subcultures as social spaces of differentiation for the construction of nonnormative identities. Shane Neilson is a disabled physician and New Brunswicker who edits for Frog Hollow Press and Gordon Hill Press. From 2010–​2017, Shane published his Affect Trilogy with the Porcupine’s Quill; Complete Physical, the first volume, was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Prize, and Dysphoria, the third volume, won the Hamilton Arts Council Poetry Award. He is the winner of SSHRC’s $50,000 “Talent Award” in 2018; in 2019, he won the Gold Medal from McMaster University for his research in the field of disability studies. Finally, he is Poetry Advisor for the CMAJ and takes great delight in soliciting disabled poets for publication. Michael Northen edits Wordgathering, A Journal of Disability and Poetry and is co-​editor of the anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and the disability short fiction anthology, xiii

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Contributors

The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked. He is a founding member of the Disability Literature Consortium. An educator for more than forty years, Northen has taught adults with physical disabilities, women on public assistance, prisoners and rural and inner city children. Rebecca Sanchez is Associate Professor of English and co-​director of the Disability Studies Program at Fordham University. Her first book, Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature, was published in 2015 with New  York University Press and in 2016 she co-​edited the republication of Pauline Leader’s memoir And No Birds Sing (Gallaudet University Press). She was a recipient of a 2015–​2016 AAUW American fellowship, and her work on disability, modernism and poetics has appeared in numerous journals and edited collections. Sami Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-​ Madison. Her research focuses on disability, race and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race & Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018). Siobhan Senier is Professor of English and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the editor of Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England (2014) and author of Sovereignty and Sustainability: Indigenous Literary Stewardship in New England (2020). With Clare Barker, she edited the 2013 special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on “Disability and Indigenous Studies”. Howard Sklar is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion (John Benjamins, 2013), as well as articles on the representation of intellectual disability in fiction in Disability Research Today: International Perspectives (Routledge, 2015), and the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (2011), among other publications. Hannah Tweed is a senior policy officer and researcher in the third sector. She supports work to drive public service reform so that disabled people, people living with long-​term conditions and unpaid carers enjoy a high quality of life, underpinned by rights to independent living, choice and control. Prior to her current role Hannah worked at the universities of York, Stirling, Edinburgh and Glasgow. She obtained her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2015. Jess Waggoner is Postdoctoral Fellow in WGSS at the University of Houston, and will be Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-​Madison, beginning Fall 2020. Waggoner’s research draws together literary and cultural studies, feminist disability studies, queer/​trans theory, and critical race studies. Their work has appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Modernism/​Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies and Journal of Feminist Scholarship. Shannon Walters is Associate Professor of English at Temple University, where she researches and teaches in rhetoric and composition, disability studies and gender studies. She is the author of Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics (University of South Carolina Press, 2014). Her work has appeared recently in PMLA, Research in the Teaching of English, Composition Forum and the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies.

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Contributors

Vanessa Warne teaches and researches the nineteenth-​century history of disability at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Sara Wasson is Lecturer in Gothic Studies at Lancaster University, and her research specialties are critical medical humanities, science fiction and twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century Gothic. Her books include the monograph Urban Gothic of the Second World War (Palgrave, 2010), Gothic Science Fiction, 1980–​2010 (Liverpool University Press, 2011), co-​edited with Emily Alder, and the monograph Transplantation Gothic (2020), forthcoming from Manchester University Press. She leads the AHRC-​funded research network “Translating Chronic Pain”. Samuel Yates is Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University. His current book project, Cripping Broadway, examines disability aesthetics and contemporary musical theater. Samuel has received ASTR’s Helen Krich-​Chinoy Dissertation Fellowship to support his research on the relationship between triple-​threat performers and disabled embodiment. Recent scholarship can be found in Studies in Musical Theatre, The Matter of Disability (Michigan University Press, 2019), and A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2019). Stephanie Yorke reads and writes. She lives in Montreal.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first thanks are to all of the contributors and to Mohammad Barangi for very generously allowing us to use his artwork on the cover of this book. I am also extremely grateful to Polly Dodson and Zoe Meyer at Routledge for all of their work in editing the book, and to Dr Marie Allitt for her rigorous proofreading and comments. Finally, I would like to thank Chris, Pete and Tom Hall and Josh, Lucy and George Freeman for all of their help and wonderful support over the time it has taken to put this book together.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND DISABILITY Alice Hall

Making spaces In his essay, “Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love My Limp,” Jim Ferris argues that: Crip poetry carries in it the potential for…[a]‌radical transformation…[it has] the potential to transform the world, to make the world in which we live roomier, not only more transparent and known, but to make more space in the imagination, and so in the culture, for the wide and startling variety of rich and fulfilling ways that real people live and love, work and play in this world. Ferris articulates his sense of the transformative potential of Crip poetry through spatial metaphors: he wants to make the world “roomier” and create “more space” in the imagination. As a poet and a critic, he is interested in the fine detail of writing and how it occupies physical space, “marks that make a shape on the page,” but also the ways in which disability perspectives can open up an expansive “cosmos of possible ontologies.” For Ferris, “to crip” is an active imaginative and critical position. Like Ferris’s essay, this collection sets out to make more room for disability perspectives and to explore some of the spaces and places that they occupy in literature, culture and contemporary criticism. One of the pleasures of putting together a Routledge Companion is the unusual scale and scope of it: the space it allows for the inclusion of analysis from a range of critical perspectives, time periods and genres, by established and emerging voices in the field. The collection as a whole is inspired by calls from Ferris and others to demonstrate the radically transformative power that disability perspectives can have on the ways in which we think about bodies, minds, practices of reading and forms of writing. This sense of possibility is frequently articulated by students and scholars in the field. Michael Davidson describes the “edgy potential, the openness and even likelihood of transformation” in disability writing, and poetry in particular (18). Tobin Siebers argues that although it is “sometimes seen from the outside as a peripheral –​as yet another sub-​genre in a growing list of identity studies,” “disability theory in fact has the potential to transform critical and cultural theory all over again” (3). 1

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In order to do this, critical disability perspectives must be given a place on curricula and disabled writers, scholars and students need to be able to access to the physical spaces of schools, universities, arts institutions and libraries. Simi Linton, in an autobiographical account of her life as a writer and disability activist, highlights the importance of occupying spaces both in a physical and a political sense; making oneself visible is, for Linton, a form of resistance: “We have come out, not in those brown wool lap robes over our withered legs, or dark glasses over our pale eyes, but in shorts and sandals…straightforward, unmasked, and unapologetic” (6). Laurie Clements Lambeth develops these political and practical questions of access into a central metaphor in her poetry. For Lambeth, poetry is a means of accessing imaginative spaces that would otherwise be closed off: What is inaccessible to most readers offers me access to the world of words, to my world, where poetic lines serve as a form of automatic doors, or elevators, or accessible parking spaces, ramps, lowered countertops. It invites me to experience it without discomfort. All of the works cited so far in this introduction share a striking sense of disability as an active critical position, one from which a disabled subject might “act” or “theorize,” rather than function merely as a passive object of research (Davis xvii). As Jina B. Kim puts it, this process is about “shifting disability from noun –​an identity one can occupy –​to verb: a critical methodology.” In spatial terms, it is about opening up existing spaces but also imagining “a world newly accessible because of alternative structures” (Chivers 884). This collection takes up some of these challenges by engaging in fresh ways with key cultural examples of disability representations from different periods and places, but also by exploring disability as a critical methodology. This means, in some cases, exploring examples where the text does not explicitly name a particular impairment or condition, but where disability structures the logic of the narrative or ways of seeing and knowing in the text. Rebecca Sanchez’s chapter in this collection, for example, argues that: One of the most exciting recent developments in literary disability studies has been the movement to consider how non-​normative embodiment, intellectual and psychiatric ways of being can operate not only as objects of study but as methodologies, as epistemologies that shape our encounters with cultural texts regardless of the presence of a clear and obvious link to disability. The idea of disability’s broad relevance to the ways we engage with literature is not itself new. (193) Her chapter explores “critical deafness” as an intersectional methodology and uses it to think about examples of American Modernist poetry. Another chapter in the collection, Kirsty Johnston’s piece on Canadian drama, engages with the Realwheels theatre production company which aims “to create and produce performances that deepen the audiences’ understanding of the disability experience. […] We tell stories in which disability itself is not the focus of conflict, but rather forms the landscape upon which universal issues are debated onstage.” (257) In this context, disability provides the essential backdrop for broader debates about rights and identities that are enacted publicly.

Critical intersections and entanglements: the structure of the book This collection seeks to showcase the diversity of contemporary critical writing about disability and to provide space for thinking through what the future of the field might be. This 2

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Introduction

is reflected in the diverse forms of disability that are represented in the literary texts that have been chosen, from D/​deaf experience (in chapters by Sanchez and Kristen Harmon) to degenerative physical conditions (such as in Johanna Emeney’s chapter on contemporary poetry). In some senses, the collection seeks to address areas that have been traditionally under-​researched in disability studies: for example, Jess Waggoner’s chapter on Afro-​modernism highlights “the whiteness of literary disability studies” and the contributions on intellectual and learning disabilities from Matt Hargrave and Howard Sklar both challenge the tendency for scholarship to focus on physical forms of disability. The collection also aims to demonstrate the depth and richness of writing about disability through analysis of a spread of texts from different genres and time periods, ranging from Chris Gabbard’s exploration of the origins of the novel, which includes amongst others Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726/​35), to David Mitchell and Susan Snyder’s analysis of “the advent of alternative neoliberal narrative spaces” in contemporary fiction. The emphasis in the vast majority of the chapters is on Anglophone writing, as is often the case in literary disability studies, but the collection does seek to show the global nature of this “English” writing about disability, for example in Stephanie Yorke’s chapter on Indian fiction and its postcolonial contexts. Also included are chapters on literatures not in English, such as Elizabeth Leake’s contribution on Italian poet Amelia Rosselli. Contributors to the collection are drawn from all over the world. The book is divided into sections according to genre. This focus on genre is, in itself, an attempt to address another area that is often overlooked in disability studies. The emphases on representation in general, or on particular types of disability such as the “autism narrative,” can sometimes flatten genre differences between quite different literary forms and divert attention away from the ways in which individual texts adhere to, disrupt or play with the conventions of their particular genre. Recognising the sophistication and complexity of how genre works in many of these texts is, I argue, part of recognising the literary value of much writing about disability and by people with disabilities. Alongside studies of race, gender and sexuality, disability studies can contribute to scholarship on so-​called “minority identities,” but it is also key to understanding the history of genres and the ways in which certain practices of reading and writing have developed across time. This collection gives roughly equal space to works from several different genres: novels and short stories; poetry; drama; life writing. In this sense, it seeks to challenge the traditional hierarchy of genres in which novels have been the primary focus of analysis for literary disability studies critics. The structure of the book also gives parity to forms that might have received less attention because of their popular appeal (such as the comics and graphic memoirs discussed in chapters by Chris Foss and Elizabeth Donaldson) or because their novelty means that their cultural value has not been endorsed by the literary establishment (such as the self-​published novella on Trans experience discussed in Cameron Awkward-​Rich’s chapter or Hannah Tweed’s analysis of “unmediated digital writing” in online forums about autism). The structure of book is not, therefore, intended to draw strict lines between genres. In fact, many of the chapters in this collection that address questions of genre directly are concerned with the great potential of generic hybridity. For Chris Foss, the rich hybridity of the comic genre is integral to its ongoing concern with representations of monstrosity. Leon Hilton’s chapter looks at experimental life writing as a mode of existential protest: “Close to the Knives,” he argues, “chafes against the genre conventions and expectations that have come to define the memoir as a literary form” (317). Stella Bolaki’s chapter highlights how this hybridity can create rich new forms and ways of thinking about autobiography: she is interesting in “mixed or cross-​ media genres. These include artists’ books, textile art, comics and digital storytelling that also blur the boundaries of art, activism and autobiography” (327). In many ways, Petra Kuppers’s 3

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chapter in the opening section, which reflects upon “the recombitant pleasures of genre –​what working in a genre framework can mean, can add, and can subvert –​stepping outside the box and examining what is in it,” sets the tone for the collection as a whole (82). The first section of this Routledge Companion provides space for the discussion of established genres alongside emerging new forms. It sets up a series of conversations about the future of the field that extend throughout the book. The opening section places literary critical perspectives on Indigenous, Trans, Black and Deaf writing side by side. In doing so, it seeks to establish the rich potential for conversations between literatures that explore different protest movements and identities, but also to retain a model of “adjacent fields” (Siebers 1), rather than mapping one directly onto another. Ann Fox’s chapter, in which she cites Eli Clare, provides a self-​conscious discussion of the possibilities and pitfalls of the intersectional model of identity favoured by many contemporary disability studies critics:  “[t]‌he layers are so tangled:  gender folds into disability, disability wraps around class, class strains against race, race snarls into sexuality, sexuality hangs onto gender, all of it finally piling into our bodies” (Clare). In the opening section, conversations about monstrosity and the Gothic connect chapters by Foss, Sara Wasson and Petra Kuppers. While these chapters engage with the contemporary period, they also set up questions that are addressed later on in the collection in relation to one of the earliest Gothic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). This Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability therefore aims to give readers a sense of the rich history of literary disability studies but also to engage them in current critical debates. Sami Schalk’s description of her chapter, as not an “exhaustive catalog of representations,” but rather a set of “tools to interpret these texts that remain simultaneously attentive to issues of disability, race, and genre,” is a relevant and productive model for the approach adopted in the collection as a whole (22). Through its various contributions, the book asks how disability works as a cultural representation, a metaphor, a social relation, an epistemology and a methodology. Underpinning this are debates about the ethical value of literature and what we are doing when we “do” disability criticism as active and engaged critics. Above all, this collection argues that these debates are relevant and important to all of us. The chapters that follow share a sense that literary and theoretical writing about disability provides a fresh critical category, access to new forms of knowledge and a means of examining the narratives through which we give shape and meaning to our lives. As Jim Ferris suggests in a striking moment of direct address to readers: This is a story about you, about your body in the world around you, about the edges to these sacks of flesh, these bags of blood and bone, of meat and gristle, of lymph and lyricism we all walk around in. Or don’t walk around in. (“Just Try”)

Works cited Chivers, Sally. “Survival of the Fittest:  CanLit and Disability.” Oxford Handbook to Canadian Literature, edited by Cynthia Sugars. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2016. www.oxfordhandbooks.com/​ view/​10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780199941865.001.0001/​oxfordhb-​9780199941865-​e-​48, accessed 2 November 2019. Clare, Eli. “Excerpt from: Digging Deep: Thinking about Privilege.” Eliclare.com, 2003. www.eliclare.com/​ what-​elioffers/​lectures/​privilege, accessed 4 November 2019. Davidson, Michael. Concerto for the Left Hand. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Davis, Lennard J. Bending Over Backwards:  Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

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Introduction Ferris, Jim. “Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love My Limp”. Wordgathering. www.wordgathering.com/​ past_​issues/​issue2/​essay/​ferris.html, accessed 2 November 2019. —​—​—​. “Just Try Having None.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol.28, no.1, 2008. 10.1080/​ 10462930701754499, accessed 2 November 2019. Kim, Jina B. “Towards a Crip-​of-​Color Critique:  Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?’” Lateral, vol.6, no.1, 2017. https://​csalateral.org/​issue/​6-​1/​forum-​alt-​humanities-​critical-​disability-​studies-​ crip-​of-​color-​critique-​kim/​, accessed 2 November 2019. Lambeth, Laurie Clements. “Gaining Access.” MS Connection. 22 September 2014. www.msconnection. org/​Blog/​September-​2014/​Gaining-​Access, accessed 2 November 2019. Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Realwheels. Realwheels.ca. http://​realwheels.ca./​, accessed 2 November 2019. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

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PART I

New directions in the field

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1 DISABILITY IN INDIGENOUS LITERATURE Siobhan Senier

Bringing Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) keywords to bear on the literary study of disability, this chapter argues that Indigenous disability cannot be thought apart from tribal sovereignty and land claims.1 Dialogue between NAIS and Disability Studies (DS) has been somewhat reluctant or halting. Perhaps this is just part and parcel of the continued marginalization of both topics –​of the fact that so many academic disciplines are still too white and/​ or too ableist. NAIS’s reluctance to embrace Disability Studies might be understood in the context of social-​science approaches to the field: Indigenous people, after all, have been routinely pathologized, subject to removal, cure, and “rehabilitation.” Disability Studies, for its part, might conceivably be puzzled by a paucity of Native American literature foregrounding disability as a category of identity or analysis, and by the seeming absence of what we might call Indigenous disability cultures –​legibly Indigenous and disabled performance arts, poetry, visual arts, and/​ or social movements. Just a few short years ago, Cherokee scholar Sean Kicummah Teuton also tried to stimulate a dialogue between our two fields. He and other scholars working at the junction of these disciplines have made two major claims: (a) that Indigenous disability is produced by colonialism, materially and discursively; and (b) that tribal communities have not necessarily Othered disability, historically or traditionally. I will review these arguments in greater depth in this chapter, but want to note here that Teuton began his foundational essay with a compelling vignette: in 1990, disabled Lakota activists staged a sit-​in at Pine Ridge tribal headquarters. They called themselves “the Quad Squad,” and they were demanding the building be made accessible.Tribal governments, as sovereign entities, are in fact exempt from Title 1 of the ADA; but poverty is arguably the greatest obstacle to their efforts to improve accessibility in tribal built environments. Compounding the problem, Teuton adds, Native American tribes experience disproportionately high rates of disability, with an estimated one in four people experiencing some form of impairment. So the Quad Squad protest can hardly be an anomaly. Surely disability protests and activism do happen on reservations and in rural tribal communities; and surely Indigenous people do participate in more urban, mixed disability collectives and communities. This kind of activism and disability expression, however, is not immediately apparent in literature written by Indigenous people. It is not that characters with disabilities don’t exist. On the contrary, physically and

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psychically wounded veterans appeared in many of the major novels of the Native American Renaissance (1960s–​ 80s) by N.  Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe). Characters living with addiction, amputations, and AIDS appear in more recent fiction by Sherman Alexie (Spokane/​Coeur d’Alene), Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki), Patricia Grace (Māori), and Tomson Highway (Cree). Disability has also been the subject of some Indigenous memoirs  –​most famously in The Broken Cord (1998), where Michael Dorris (Modoc) writes about his son’s Fetal Alcohol Syndrome; and in Basil Johnston’s (Ojibwe) Crazy Dave (1999), about his great-​uncle who had Down’s Syndrome. Additionally, a small but growing number of scholars have begun to examine disability in these texts, including Clare Barker, Keely Byars-​Nichols, G. Thomas Couser, Mary J. Couzelis, and Michelle Jarman. But these are representations of disability by Indigenous authors who are not themselves disabled, or who at least have not publicly identified as such. In what follows, I try to offer a glimpse of an Indigenous disability literature canon –​works authored by Indigenous people who openly claim disability identities (or have had those thrust upon them) and who make disability a subject of their work. I argue that insofar as we might identify an Indigenous disability aesthetic or poetics, we should see it as deeply rooted in tribal nationhood and land relations. My discussion is grounded in terms elaborated in the important collection Native Studies Keywords (2015), edited by Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja. These are concepts that have long-​standing importance in NAIS, and that continue to be refined and contested by Indigenous scholars. They can help shed light on Indigenous disability literature, and in turn be enriched by concepts from within Disability Studies.

Sovereignty and nation At some level, every Indigenous text is arguably about sovereignty. When NAIS scholars speak of sovereignty, they are invoking Indigenous peoples’ unique political and legal status. In the United States, Native Americans are not “ethnic minorities” in the same way as African Americans, Asian Americans, and other “hyphenated” groups, because they have specific territorial claims and rights to self-​government, many of which are enshrined and recognized in federal and international law.Teves, Smith, and Raheja succinctly trace the development of sovereignty as a critical concept in NAIS as an academic discipline, observing that while on the one hand, it has prompted scholars to seek “to defend indigenous nationhood” first and foremost, on the other hand it has also been limited or problematic, insofar as it depends on “recognition” from the colonial state. Thus, many Indigenous intellectuals now define sovereignty much more capaciously, speaking, for example, of intellectual sovereignty, visual sovereignty, and rhetorical sovereignty –​in short, of the rights of Indigenous people to have first voice and control over their representations. One contributor to Native Studies Keywords, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg), argues that sovereignty can be conceptualized and exercised outside of the framework of modern nation-​states, as “authentic power coming from a generated consensus and a respect for dissent rather than…from authoritarian power or power-​over style of governance” (19). Simpson and like-​minded colleagues have led NAIS to be much more concerned with liberation and intersectionality –​“envisioning,” as Teves and colleagues put it, “what sovereignty would look like if it were based on principles of justice for all peoples and care for all of creation” (15). We might say that Deaf Indian writers express intellectual sovereignty, for example, when they argue for the primacy of American Indian Sign Language (AISL) over American Sign Language (ASL), either as something that preceded the creation of ASL or as something more 10

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culturally appropriate and meaningful for them. Howard Busy (Mississippi Choctaw/​Eastern Cherokee) relates a story of Apache leaders traveling to Washington, D.C., for diplomatic negotiations in 1872; when they came upon students from Gallaudet, he says, “soon the two groups were signing to each other in combinations of American Sign Language and Indian signs” (42). Historian Brenda Farnell suggests that “the situation was complex, to say the least”; that “what mutual understanding was achieved was probably the result of explicit miming combined with trial and error, rather than the use of either sign language. Both groups were already very skilled in using the medium and no doubt rose to the occasion with creativity” (43). Farnell’s point is that not all gestural languages (even all Indigenous gestural languages) are the same, or mutually intelligible dialects; but it is also worth noting that what motivates Indigenous people to elevate AISL over ASL is not necessarily a rejection of Deaf culture and identity. In cases where AISL is still practiced by tribal members, some Indigenous activists find that it “is much easier and faster to learn [than ASL, and] is more functional and might be appropriate in a rural or an isolated family situation” (Lovern and Locust 103). Moreover, they may assert that “hand sign systems specifically tie themselves to Earth” (Lovern and Locust 23). This insistence on tribally specific, grounded disability practices can be seen as another way of asserting sovereignty. In the collection Step into the Circle (2002), Busy and other Deaf Indians describe a disability experience in which the desire for re-​connection with tribal lands and tribal community is paramount. Recounting the founding of the Intertribal Deaf Council in 1993, Walter P. Kelley (Northern Cheyenne) recalls that organizers believed it critical to host the first conference on Native land, so they chose Oklahoma City, mindful of that state’s history as an Indian territory. Conference topics centered on Native heritage, language, and culture more than on Deaf issues because so many participants “had to leave their native homes due to the lack of nearby educational and vocational services for deaf and hard of hearing people. They also indicated that they had lost their Native American roots due to leaving home at an early age and growing up in the ‘Deaf World’ ” (Paris et al. 7). These writers do not discount the idea of Deaf Gain; but they do suggest that it is perhaps more complex for Indigenous people to negotiate. While attendance at a school like Gallaudet and the embrace of a distinct Deaf culture has been central to much Deaf culture and pride, Indigenous people also bring with them long histories of removal from their home communities precisely for purposes of education –​education meant to assimilate and exterminate them. Thus, it might be just as important for Indigenous people to assert the Indianness of sign language as it is to embrace sign language as a disability cultural practice. The editors of Step into the Circle characterize AISL as “broader in meaning than ASL…made against the background of the sky (toward nature), whereas ASL makes signs closer to the body. AISL can be read at a much greater distance than ASL” (Paris et al. 37).This is not a claim that AISL is superior (many Deaf Indians use both), only that it is distinct, and can be held up as a marker of sovereignty. Step into the Circle does resonate with many Disability Studies tenets, including a resounding rejection of the notion of victimhood or cure: “in Indian Sign Language, we have no words for help or rehabilitation. We can sign WORK-​TOGETHER. Deaf Natives want partners, not saviors. That’s the Traditional way –​equality in the circle” (Paris et al. 39). AISL is now considered an endangered language like other Indigenous languages; and, as Jeffrey Davis illustrates, it is now the subject of language revitalization efforts, like those other languages. Language revitalization is a critical practice in tribal nation (re)building; and tribal nationhood –​“a term freighted with authority and…reflecting the political structure and organizational principles of Native social and cultural experience” (Teves et al. 157) –​underwrites even Indigenous texts that do not seem overtly political. Sherman Alexie, for instance, has never made a secret of his childhood hydrocephaly, nor his alcoholism, but in his recent memoir, You 11

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Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (2017), he “came out” as disabled: “I was officially diagnosed as bipolar in 2010, but I think my first symptoms appeared when I was a child” (7). Alexie recounts a childhood wracked by surgeries and stints to drain the fluid from his head; seizures and medication (“I was a kindergartner on phenobarbital,” 7); nightmares and hallucinations; and family violence. Personal though this story may be, Alexie returns again and again to a major abrogation of tribal sovereignty that haunts his family and lurks behind illnesses and disabilities: in the 1930s, the U.S. government built the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington State, territory traditionally inhabited by the Spokane and other tribes. The dam destroyed salmon spawning grounds, in turn decimating not only a major source of sustenance for the tribes but also their important burial and ceremonial sites. The loss of salmon has far-​ reaching effects, contributing, as Alexie sees it, to his family’s vulnerability and illnesses, which he calls “salmon-​g rief ” (139). My mother and father were members of the first generation of Interior Salish people who lived entirely without wild salmon. My mother and father, without wild salmon, were spiritual orphans. My father was also orphaned by war and contagious disease. My siblings and I were conceived, birthed, and nurtured by orphans –​by the salmonless and parentless and non-​immune. (138–​39) Alexie’s mother, whom he believes to have been “an undiagnosed bipolar grandiose fabulist,” tells him a story about once walking across the pre-​dammed river on the backs of salmon. Alexie thinks she’s lying, but he also thinks “it’s a lie in service of scientific and spiritual truth” –​that “the Grand Coulee Dam is an epic gravestone,” the site where his nation’s history and future were “murdered” by a colonial government (133). In Alexie’s case, then, disability is not only a product of colonialism, but the standpoint from which colonialism may be best understood.

Land Indigenous sovereignty and nation are, therefore, inextricable from Indigenous land. Here again, Indigenous people differ from other cultural minorities in their long-​standing claims to particular geographic territories –​claims enshrined in international law. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), Article 25, asserts that “Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters, and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard” (United Nations). Teves and her colleagues note that what is critical in this formulation of land claims is not the “temporal framework of prior occupancy,” but rather the “spatial framework of radical relationality to land” (67). This radical relationality resonates with themes in Disability Studies, and also in Ecocriticism. In this sense, Native American and Indigenous Studies and Disability Studies seem to be heading toward some mutually informative kinds of inquiry, as each is dedicated to thinking through notions of interdependence and reciprocity  –​both to analyze the ways that bodies cannot be understood apart from their environments, and to imagine the ways that we might make bodies more mutually interdependent with other bodies and with more progressively constructed environments. Recent work on disability in the Global South, for instance, has trained attention on how colonialism, poverty, and racism help produce disability, materially and discursively. Scholars including Nirmala Erevelles, Shaun Grech, Helen Meekosha, and Karen 12

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Soldatic have shown that, on the most obvious level, cutting off access to traditional foods and polluting waterways produces bodily impairment for Indigenous and poor people. As Grech puts it, “the privatization of property, the introduction of an economic value on food, and the exploitation of land beyond sustainable use meant environmental and land degradation, reduced food availability and shifted age-​old sustainable cultivation patterns, often leading to starvation and consequently disease and impairment” (12). Jen Meunier, an Autistic Algonquin Anishinabe writer and activist, uses her poetry to explore this radical relationality to the land. In her contribution to the monumental new collection All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism (2017), she inserts herself into current discussions around neurodiversity as a critical form of biodiversity. She reappropriates and redefines some of the clinical terms used to describe her own neuro-​atypicality: echolalalia a language all its own, meaning understood in echoed mirrors whose lean toward each other reflects the common interdependence of living and unliving beings on each other stims emotion as movement, movement as emotion. body expressiveness in a language broader and deeper than the linear word can convey; ceremony; a means of calm and a physical translation of joy. (Brown et al. 430) This is a disability poetics characterized, to quote Jim Ferris, by “a challenge to stereotypes and an insistence on self-​definition; foregrounding of the perspective of people with disabilities; [and] an emphasis on embodiment, especially atypical embodiment” (Black et al. 22). Its emphasis on embodiment not only exceeds notions of normalcy but also exceeds notions of the human (for its witnessing of the “common interdependence of living and unliving beings”). Meunier indigenizes her disability poetics, perhaps most notably through her invocation of ceremony. Connecting the disabled poet to her ancestors and her home territory, ceremony is one way of performing what Leanne Simpson has called one of the most radical and important things that contemporary Indigenous people can do: “put our bodies on the land.” This is not necessarily an ableist call. Historically and traditionally, of course, as we saw with Alexie, it was vital for tribal communities to be able to convene, physically, in spiritually and economically sustaining places. But in cases where disabled bodies might not be able to access traditional territories and sacred spaces (or even for able-​bodied people whose access to those places is now cut off), poetry can also be a powerful form of remembering and creating such ceremonial connections anew. Meunier maintains a blog where she continues to ponder the relationships between broken Indigenous bodies and broken Indigenous lands: …I need my scars to be the best thing you see about me … and I need to see every pipeline shut down on the evening news as a memorial to genocide 13

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…I need this water like I need this body, these blown veins, this scarred body and the land is my body is the land is your body is the land, is nibi, is niiyaw (“September 16, 2017”) Ojibwe has no single word for “body”; the stem “iiyaw” requires a prefix, such that “giiyaw” means “your body” and “niiyaw” means “my body.” Meunier’s juxtaposition of this word with “nibi,” the word for “water,” visually and sonically dismantles distinctions between “this body” and the land, between individual addiction in the form of “these blown veins” and global capital’s addiction to extractive industry in the form of pipelines. The poem lyricizes what anthropologist Zoe Todd (Métis) describes as a millenia-​old Indigenous philosophical orientation toward interconnected “legal theory, human-​animal relations and multiple epistemologies/​ ontologies” (14). For Indigenous writers, this interconnection surpasses the simple acknowledgment of interdependence (“everything is connected”), to affective identification with the land, and with other-​than-​humans. For example, Cheryl Savageau (Abenaki) uses the term “crazywoods” to describe her experiences with bipolar/​manic depressive illness in her memoir, Out of the Crazywoods (2020). “Crazywoods” is part metaphor, to be sure, one that enables Savageau to explore “those creative bursts/​that episodic joy” that are one facet of bipolar experience:  “there are brilliant berries/​in the crazywoods.” But her use of environmental images goes far beyond metaphor into identification: You have to be a little bit crazy to live in the crazy woods you have to look through the eyes of the old ones… you have to greet the wind you have to throw back your head and howl We can read the word “crazy” as an intentional reclamation, a la Mad Pride. And we can read the howling and the greeting of the wind as not just performance, but as deep identification with an ecosystem that is part of Savageau’s northeastern homeland, an identification with ancestors and with other-​than-​humans. This is more than quaint cliché: reading such passages intentionally, with consideration for the intersections between Indigeneity and disability, we can situate them as contributions to this emerging intersectional canon.

Colonialism What abrogates Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty  –​their ability to care for, and be cared for by, their lands –​is, of course, colonialism. Many scholars in Native American and Indigenous Studies prefer to speak of settler colonialism rather than “post-​colonialism,” on the grounds that 14

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there is no “post” in colonization for Indigenous people. Following Patrick Wolfe, who has described settler invasion as “a structure not an event” (2), Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars have sought to underscore the ongoing structural violence of colonization. In her book The Ecological Other (2013), ecocritic Sarah Jaquette Ray reads Native American literature as a sustained critique of extractive, colonialist capitalism, precisely through what she finds is its “trope of the disabled body” (84). Her identification of this trope opens up new possibilities for authors like Alexie, who have not previously been read as disabled. For instance, even his earlier short story, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” attends to the interconnections between disease and colonial violence. The story follows an alcoholic narrator through 24 hours in which he tries to raise money to reclaim his grandmother’s regalia from a pawn shop, only to drink every dollar away as he earns it. Peppered throughout this apparently pathological picaresque are references to the damage done to tribal lands and people: to the Spokane Reservation’s uranium mine, which the narrator’s father believes gave his grandmother cancer; to the presence of “three Aleut cousins,” drawn to Seattle in hopes of finding gainful employment, now homeless; and indeed to the wholesale theft of Native cultural items like the grandmother’s regalia. “I am living proof of the horrible damage colonialism has done to us Skins,” the narrator says, “But I’m not going to let you know how scared I sometimes get of history and its ways” (171). Alexie’s trademark humor and sarcasm have sometimes masked his sharp critique of colonialism and the ways that it has sickened Native people and their lands. We might say, then, that illness and disability are prevalent in Indigenous literature because they are so prevalent in Indigenous communities; further, that disabled Indigenous writers are revealing how illness and disability are direct products of colonial history. One of the most sustained colonial traumas visited upon Indigenous people worldwide is the removal of children from tribal communities, either through off-​reservation boarding schools or systematic out-​adoption. Canada had the “Sixties Scoop,” during which tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were taken from their parents and given to white middle-​class families for adoption or fostering. In the United States, the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978 to address a similar, systemic removal of Native children from their families and tribal communities. These adoptions were predicated on the ideology that Indigenous families were pathologically “unfit” to care for their children, who could only be “saved” by removal. A further cruel outcome of this practice was that many of the children were further traumatized by the experience. In the 1990s, Carol Locust (Cherokee) conducted a study of Native American adults who had experienced out-​of-​culture adoptions and concluded that the practice caused lasting psychological damage. Labeling this “split feather syndrome,” she found that her study participants experienced overwhelmingly (1) the loss of Indian identity; (2) the loss of family, culture, heritage, language, spiritual beliefs, tribal affiliation, and tribal ceremonial experiences; (3) growing up feeling “different”; (4) experiencing discrimination; and (5) cognitive differences in learning style. She identified a “reciprocal possessiveness of cultural identity” among her respondents, “a defiant, almost fierce pride in being American Indian.” Some of these effects are explored in Two Worlds (2012) and Called Home (2014), which anthologize personal memoirs and studies of Native Americans who were adopted away from their Indigenous cultures. In addition to trauma and split feather syndrome, boarding schools created devastating physical illnesses. They ushered in massive epidemics of tuberculosis, for example. In her as-​ told-​to autobiography, Madonna Swan: A Lakota Woman’s Story (1991), Swan recounts how she contracted the disease at a boarding school away from her home on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. She was institutionalized for many years at the Sioux Sanatorium in Rapid City, subjected to forced rest, lung compression, and the surgical removal of one lung and all of her ribs on one side, which left her disabled. Worse, tuberculosis carried a profound 15

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stigma, and her tribal community initially shunned her upon her release from boarding school. Her story suggests that not only did colonial institutions create her physical disability, but that colonial ideologies also permeated the culture on her reservation, inducing her fellow tribal members to construe disability as shameful or dangerous.

Blood Indigenous people worldwide have been bedeviled by colonial ideas about “blood,” expressed in bureaucratic formulas for reckoning their descent and identity. Teves and her colleagues explain that, historically, “blood-​ quantum laws were deployed to racialize Native peoples, replacing Native senses of belonging and kinship, which varied across tribal communities before the twentieth century” (200). Though colonial governmental policies vary from country to country, many have this in common:  the ideology of blood quantum helps administer and manage populations that have long-​standing claims to particular resources. If, for example, as in the United States, a person needs a particular “percentage” of blood to qualify as “Native American” and access particular resources (e.g., health care or educational scholarships), then colonial governments can use historical realities like exogamy to show that there are fewer Indians to make claims on resources. In other words, the idea of “blood purity” underwrites Indigenous land and resource dispossession. One question, then, is how tribal communities and individual authors push back against these ideologies. Elissa Washuta, whose brilliant memoir, My Body Is a Book of Rules (2014), documents her experiences with bipolar syndrome, is acutely aware of how both her Indian identity and mental health have been managed and administered. She says, When I tell people I’m Native, they often ask,“How much?” It seems to be a reflex… . I don’t know why anyone cares to know my quantum, but I never want to be rude. I  am three-​thirty-​seconds Indian:  one-​sixteenth Cascade and one-​thirty-​second Cowlitz. Since the Cascade tribe has been split into pieces, I am enrolled Cowlitz. When the Cascade leaders were hanged, all the other Cascade Indians were rounded up by Lieutenant Phil Sheridan, put on an island, and told that they would be shot if they tried to leave.You know Sheridan because you’ve heard, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” He was talking about me because he was talking about Indians like my great-​great-​g reat-​grandpa Tumalth, whom he hanged on March 28, 1856. (15) For Washuta, there is a straight line running through her tribe’s and family’s traumatic history, the ways that her Indian identity has been legislated, and the trauma to her own bodymind. When she arrives at college, where she learns “that white boys don’t care if you’re legitimately enrolled Cowlitz if they think you robbed their college education coffers of their hundred thousand dollars they worked toward through countless hours holding a tuba on a high school football field” (4), she starts binge drinking and starving herself: …my body, never a temple, became a haunted house. I tried to reduce the number of rooms I carried, shutting the doors on my love handles, narrowing the hallways of my loose upper arms, and collapsing the great hall of my gut. If I made myself into a tiny studio apartment, I reasoned, I might banish all the ghosts that clung to my bones. (5) Hovering over the college experience, and her adult experience in the mental health system, are sets of rules: warnings about the dangers of alcohol written on dorm hallway bulletin boards and 16

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medication bottles; report cards that document her academic work; and psychiatric reports that chart her (non)compliance. Washuta’s is in many ways a bleak story. Just as blood quantum itself “may be a tragically necessary condition for the survival and vitality of many individuals and communities,” because it helps to defend them from fraudulent claims against limited resources (Pauline Strong, qtd. in Teves 206), so too does Washuta describe medication that helps manage her bipolar as a necessary evil: “my body is decaying as I let my brain marinate in trauma” (51). And just as Native communities use constructs of blood and kinship in complex ways to their own ends,Washuta uses her writing to reconstruct this historical kinship.Where Savageau writes of her bipolar through identification with land and water, Washuta reimagines family: The doctors keep asking about my family.They want to know who was bipolar before me… . I imagine Tumalth, the twenty-​five-​year-​old headman, in a psychiatrist’s office, staring at his ankles, divulging his anxiety about the future. I hear Mary shaking a pill bottle like a rattle. I can’t tell the doctors what they want to hear; we were without diagnoses until I fell. Bipolar disorder has the clinical film of a white man’s invention… . There is no act of neurochemical balancing that can restore order to [our] dismantled world. I  do not think I  was predestined for brokenness  –​this world of ours has shown itself to have no sense of order to make such a feat possible –​but I’m learning to talk to the ancestors, listen for answers, stay awake in dreams, and let those loved ones erase the muddy corners of my brain so I might learn all over again how to know anything at all. (180)

Tradition and Indigenous epistemologies Penelope Kelsey (Seneca descent) also uses notions of belonging and kinship to argue that the Madonna Swan narrative, though marketed as a story of “perseverance,” can be read against the grain of that form that is so problematic for Disability Studies: the overcoming narrative. To Kelsey, Swan’s gradual acceptance back at Cheyenne River is less interesting for her individual triumphs over her disability than for “that community’s progressive decolonization of its care of the ill and disabled” (196). In this reading, the restoration of kinship bonds is a form of resistance, both to colonization and to colonial constructions of disability. It is a way of reclaiming traditional forms of social organization, and traditional epistemologies that produce very different understandings of bodily and mental difference. Mississauga Ojibwe actor Tristan Thunderbolt’s song “Broken Ears” follows a similar trajectory to Kelsey’s interpretation of the Madonna Swan story.Thunderbolt, a graduate of Gallaudet, writes from the point of view of a ten-​year-​old boy struggling to accept his deafness. I have been to the reservation tent revivals to get my hearing back God must not exist ‘cause I’m Deaf, forever No healings, no sage, no feathers nor sweat lodges Can help these broken ears of mine, ever. (34) But this youthful despair is overturned by an elder who tells him “you do not need to hear it/​ It’s in your heart, be proud,” and gives him the “tribal name of Broken Ears” (34). By the end of the song, this moniker is a marker of pride and tribal belonging: From the grave of my Chief who named me Broken Ears Thanks for your wisdom, I know I have nothing to fear. (34) 17

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In addition to striving to decolonize collective attitudes toward disability, there is some evidence that tribes also devote their limited resources to trying to make their built environments more accessible. Everett Soop, a political cartoonist from the Blood Reserve in Alberta, lived with muscular dystrophy, and seems to have experienced considerable isolation –​partly as a result of his disability, and partly because of his years of contentious involvement in tribal politics. One day in October of 1981, he seemed to hit the limits of his sardonic attacks on his fellow tribal members: On behalf of the handicapped people of the Blood Reserve, I asked for a handicap bus and other services for these “Yearees” in the Year of the Disabled People. And what does the council and chief do? They not only fulfilled my wishes, but gave suggestions as to where we could get additional help. These despicable idiots deliberately insulted me by trying to be human. I was astounded by their extreme concern and with their undisguised display of traditional values of generosity. I realized these were my people (that I did not vote for) and they were actually and practically HUMAN! Our chief and councilors have heard my feelings. They have made my heart soar like an eagle. They proved that they have a heart  –​especially for the handicapped people. This kind of gesture makes me feel so good that I  don’t think I’ll ever do another insulting cartoon about them –​until next time. (119) 1981 was indeed declared “The International Year of Disabled Persons” by the United Nations. Some people mocked the 1981 declaration as shallow, including, it would seem, Soop himself. But his surprised reaction suggests that a local tribal government did use it as the occasion to establish some policies that have in fact endured (Grinder S13). As the Madonna Swan story indicates, tribal communities are not utopias, and disability stigma is hardly unknown there. But even Swan recalls how more traditionally-​minded elders challenged colonial thinking:  when Swan’s house was flagged with red tags to indicate that someone inside had TB, her grandmother stormed over and tore the tags off the house, saying, “She’s not bad –​she’s going to get well!” (63). Some Indigenous intellectuals go so far as to say that disability discrimination did not exist before settler colonialism. Lavonna Lovern contends that “ ‘disability’ is created and perpetuated primarily according to Western constructs…[not] a universal, but rather a product of Western ideology and colonization” (308). This claim is not necessarily romantic stereotyping, nor does it preclude an acknowledgment of variation among tribes. It does recognize, however, that precolonial societies saw fewer physical impairments and diseases of the kinds that became common after European invasion, and that those societies did not necessarily construe disability as a category of otherness. Sean Teuton observes that “in many oral traditions, disability is a paradoxical source of power” (581). He notes that the Haudenosaunee Great Peacemaker, Dekanawida, had a speech impairment; that Tecumseh’s brother, the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa, was blind in one eye; and that the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah had one leg shorter than the other. What Teuton is describing here are oral traditions that, in some ways, effectively anticipated some of the insights of early Disability Studies –​that disability is a construct dependent on its context, and that it can in fact be a valued capacity. The structure-​not-​event of colonialism, therefore, with its attendant attacks on Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous lands, has clearly worked to disable Indigenous bodies and nations. At the same time, it seems clear that reconnection to traditional territories and to the cultures that coevolved with those territories has allowed tribal communities to “accommodate” somatic and cognitive difference in powerful ways. Literature written by Indigenous veterans, 18

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including Philip Red Eagle, is demonstrating how traditional ceremonies can be more effective methods of coping with PTSD than individualized treatments espoused by Western medicine. As Gros Ventre psychologist Joseph Gone puts it, given that “the epidemic of dysfunction” within some tribal communities has been the direct result of “the Euro-​American disruption of [tribal] interpersonal relationships,” “it stands to reason…that the return to right relationships through revitalized ritual practice would be the most appropriate and effective of therapeutic interventions” (296). With national and international attention currently trained on Indigenous resurgence movements –​on the highly visible protests against projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline and the resultant violence against Indigenous bodies –​this is a timely moment to introduce Indigenous sovereignty and land claims into discussions of disability.

Note 1 The relatively recent designation “Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS)” aims to make space for three disciplinary strands that have previously been in tension or contest: “tribal nation specificity, Indigenous literary nationalism, and trans[national]-​Indigenous methodologies” (2). I follow common practices in this field by capitalizing “Indigenous” and using authors’ preferred spellings for their tribal affiliations, indicated parenthetically after their surnames. Because of space constraints and my own research focus, the article at hand focuses largely on Native North America.

Works cited Alexie, Sherman. “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.” Ten Little Indians, Grove Press, 2003, pp.169–​94. The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2003/​04/​21/​what-​you-​pawn-​i-​will-​redeem. —​—​—​. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. Barker, Clare. Postcolonial Fiction and Disability:  Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Black, Sheila, et al., editors. Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Cinco Puntos Press, 2011. Brown, Lydia, et  al. All the Weight of Our Dreams:  On Living Racialized Autism. Autism Women’s Network, 2017. Couser, G.Thomas. “Raising Adam: Ethnicity, Disability, and the Ethics of Life Writing in Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord.” Biography, vol.21, no.4, Fall 1998, pp.421–​44. Couzelis, Mary J. “‘Who We Was’: Creating Witnesses in Joseph Bruchac’s Hidden Roots.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol.7, no.2, May 2013, pp.159–​74. Farnell, Brenda. Do You See What I Mean? Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action. University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Gone, Joseph. “‘We Never Was Happy Living like a Whiteman’:  Mental Health Disparities and the Postcolonial Predicament in American Indian Communities.” American Journal of Community Psychology, vol.40, 2007, pp.290–​300. Grech, Shaun, and Karen Soldatic. Disability in the Global South: The Critical Handbook. Springer, 2016. Grinder, Barb. “Society Offers Services to Blood Disabled.” Windspeaker Magazine, vol.13, no.1, 1995, p.S13. Kelsey, Penelope Myrtle. “Disability and Native North American Boarding School Narratives: Madonna Swan and Sioux Sanitorium.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol.7, no.2, 2013, pp.195–​211. Locust, Carol. “Split Feathers Study.” Pathways, vol.13, no.4, 1998. Lovern, Lavonna. “Indigenous Perspectives on Difference:  A Case for Inclusion.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol.11, no.3, 2017, pp.303–​20. Lovern, Lavonna L., and Carol Locust. Native American Communities on Health and Disability:  Borderland Dialogues. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Meunier, Jen. “September 16, 2017.” nerve in the curve. https://​nerveinthecurve.wordpress.com/​2017/​09/​ 16/​september-​16-​2017-​after-​the-​water-​walk/​. Accessed September 21, 2019. Paris, Damara Goff, et al. Step into the Circle: The Heartbeat of American Indian, Alaska Native, and First Nations Deaf Communities. AGO Publications, 2002.

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Siobhan Senier Ray, Sarah Jaquette. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. 2nd edition, University of Arizona Press, 2013. Red Eagle, Philip. Red Earth: A Vietnam Warrior’s Journey. Salt Publishing, 2007. Savageau, Cheryl. Out of the Crazywoods. University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Soop, Everett. I See My Tribe Is Still Behind Me! Glenbow Museum, 1990. Teuton, Sean Kicummah.“Disability in the Indigenous Americas.” The World of Indigenous North America, ed. Robert Warrior, Routledge, 2014, pp.569–​93. Teves, Stephanie Nohelani, et al., editors. Native Studies Keywords. University of Arizona Press, 2015. Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol.29, no.1, 2016, pp.4–​22. Thunderbolt,Tristan. “Broken Ears.” Introduction to American Deaf Culture, ed.Thomas K. Holcomb. Oxford University Press, 2013, pp.24–​25. United Nations, Commission on Human Rights. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. United Nations, 2007. Washuta, Elissa. My Body Is a Book of Rules. Red Hen Press, 2014. Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: the Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. Cassell, 1999.

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2 DISABILITY IN BLACK SPECULATIVE FICTION Sami Schalk

In her essay “Positive Obsession,” the late Octavia E.  Butler, a black woman science fiction writer with dyslexia, notes that she is often asked:  “What good is science fiction to black people?” (Bloodchild and Other Stories 134). In response, she writes: What good is any literature to Black people? What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing, thinking. (Bloodchild and Other Stories 134–​35) In these rhetorical questions, Butler echoes what writers and scholars of science and speculative fiction have consistently argued: that the unlimited possibilities of speculative fiction have important liberatory potential for marginalized people (Barr; Kilgore; Lavender;Vint; Melzer). Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for a collection of non-​realist genres including science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, utopian and dystopian literature, alternative history, futuristic fiction, and more. As Sandra Jackson and Julie E. Moody-​Freeman write, “the primary question posted by writers of speculative fiction is, what if?” (2). Using the term speculative fiction allows for the inclusion of any non-​realist texts that imaginatively grapple with questions of “what if?” even if those texts do not include the science and technology foundational to the more specific yet also more common category of science fiction.Writers from marginalized groups in particular have used the genre of speculative fiction to imagine alternative pasts, presents, and futures which can warn, teach, give hope, provide escape, or envision worlds without oppression or without the identities upon which certain oppressions are based. More specifically, this chapter focuses on black speculative fiction; that is, speculative fiction written by authors of African descent, and the representation of disability within this area of fiction. While the scholarship on disability in black speculative fiction is still relatively small and emergent, the representations nonetheless exist, awaiting scholarly exploration by those conversant in the fields of disability studies, critical race theory, and literary criticism. This chapter, 21

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therefore, will provide overviews of the genre of black speculative fiction and the scholarship on disability in speculative fiction. I will then bring these areas together to provide methodological suggestions about how to approach analyzing disability and diverse bodyminds in black speculative fiction. In this chapter I use term bodymind after Margaret Price. It is a feminist disability studies concept that refers to the inextricability of mind and body which seeks to emphasize how processes within and outside of our being impact one another in a myriad of unpredictable ways that cannot be cleanly divided from one another. Finally, I demonstrate joining critical race and disability studies approaches to analyzing speculative fiction in brief readings of example texts. The intent of this chapter is less to provide an exhaustive catalog of representations of disability in black speculative fiction and more to offer the tools to interpret these texts in ways that remain simultaneously attentive to issues of disability, race, and genre.

Black speculative fiction: an overview Black speculative fiction is a robust genre that encompasses a wide range of texts in terms of topics and aesthetics. While the bulk of black speculative fiction has been written since the 1970s, some of the earliest black speculative fiction was written in the early twentieth century, such as W. E. B. DuBois’s 1920 short story “The Comet” about a white woman and black man who may be the only survivors after a comet hits New York, and George Schuyler’s 1931 Black No More, a satirical novel which represents the social and political chaos that ensues when a black scientist develops the technology to make black people appear white. In each of these early instances, some of the common themes in black speculative fiction are already present, including imagining how racial identity and race relations change as environmental and social contexts shift. A fundamental aspect of black speculative fiction is challenging the assumption readers have about key social systems such as race, gender, sexuality, and disability. As Nalo Hopkinson states in an interview: If I were to write mimetic fiction, I’d be to some extent limited by what is known of the world…However, in fantastical fiction, I can directly manipulate the metaphorical structure of the story. I can create a science fictional world in which relative fatness or slimness has about the same significance as eye color, but only persons under five feet, five inches are considered beautiful…In other words, one of the things I can do is to intervene in the readers’ assumptions by creating a world in which standards are different. (qtd in Nelson 100–​01) In speculative fiction authors morph social systems of power in imaginative, exciting, and terrifying ways. Historically, the genre of speculative fiction, especially futuristic science fiction, has imagined worlds in which contemporary social categories no longer matter or no longer exist. However, representations of these worlds often default to norms of whiteness, able-​bodiedness, masculinity, and heterosexuality. Rather than representing marginalized people or grappling with the challenges of creating a world without racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, and other oppressions, many early writers of speculative fiction avoided current social issues by creating new Others such as aliens, cyborgs, and robots which serve as indirect metaphorical stand-​ins for real-​world marginalized groups. Writers of black speculative fiction have developed ways to represent people of color and other minorities and grapple explicitly with issues of oppression. These authors do this even as the genre of speculative fiction is often considered lesser, 22

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nonliterary, apolitical, juvenile, and escapist. Despite black literature’s tradition of realism, which sought to use writing to improve the situation of black people via raising awareness and creating positive representation, writers of black speculative fiction have consistently demonstrated the incredible political and literary potential of the genre (Lubiano; Jarrett). The social and political value of black speculative fiction is evident in some of the key terms of the genre. These include Afrofuturism, a term coined by Mark Dery to designate black representations of technology and futurity in a variety of media; or visionary fiction, a term coined by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown to describe fiction that uses non-​realism to explore social issues in a way that centers marginalized people and exposes power inequity with the intent of creating social and political change (Dery; brown; see also: Womack). Leading writers discussed under these categories of Afrofuturism and black speculative or visionary fiction include Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Nisi Shawl, Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, N.  K. Jemisin, Andrea Hairston, Colson Whitehead, and Toni Morrison. Further, Sheree Renée Thomas’s Dark Matter anthologies are important collections of black speculative fiction across various historical periods. The political and social impulses of much black speculative fiction is not, however, limited to racial concerns, but also engages frequently with gender and sexuality and, increasingly, disability as well. The role of disability in speculative fiction generally is an important, though sometimes vexed, issue. While speculative fiction texts, particularly futuristic fiction, have often imagined predominantly nondisabled worlds and futures in which disability is wholly prevented or cured through advanced technology, several disability studies scholars have noted that the genre seems nonetheless obsessed with disability and shifting embodiments (Bérubé “Disability and Narrative” 568; Siebers 7; Kafer 20; Cheyne 148). Just as critical race scholars of speculative fiction have noted how aliens and other non-​realist beings raise issues of race even without the presence of racialized humans, disability studies scholars have insisted that speculative fiction’s engagement with changing bodyminds, technology (medical and otherwise), and new species is very much about the concepts of disability and ability. Research on disability and speculative fiction is still emergent. Nonetheless, the existing disability studies scholarship on speculative fiction has been key in understanding how the genre can reveal the social and contextual nature of disability; it also helps us to consider how speculative fiction invites reader to imagine how disabled people might exist in the future and alternative worlds (Allan; Vanderhooft; Moody; Arndt and Van Beuren; Newman-​ Stille; Schalk Bodyminds). Given the burgeoning nature of this area of research, the body of scholarship on disability in black speculative fiction specifically is understandably even smaller and it is overwhelmingly focused on the work of Octavia E. Butler who almost consistently wrote black disabled female protagonists (Shawl “Invisible Inks”; Obourn; Pickens; Curtis; or Schalk Bodyminds; Schalk “Experience, Research, and Writing”; Schalk “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race”). Black writers of speculative fiction often represent disability and typically do so in ways that must be analyzed in conjunction with issues of race. In the next section, therefore, I offer two overarching and interrelated methods that are essential to analyzing disability in black speculative fiction: using disability studies as an analytical approach and reading from an intersectional perspective.

Approaches to analyzing disability in black speculative fiction In order to fully grapple with how disability appears in black speculative fiction, one must first understand disability studies to be not an object-​oriented area of study, but, as Julie Avril Minich argues, a “mode of analysis” which “involves scrutinizing not bodily or mental impairments but 23

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the social norms that define particular attributes as impairments, as well as the social conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular populations.” Understanding and using disability studies as a methodology allows scholars to focus on the social norms which produce (dis) ability, the historically and culturally specific system of bodily, mental, emotional, and behavioral norms which creates, ranks, and evaluates categories of disability and ability with real material effects. (Dis)ability is an essential term to enacting this approach because it works as a parallel to terms like race and gender while also conceptually allowing for the inclusion of issues of illness and disease which may not necessarily fit within the legally or medically defined category of disability as we currently understand it (Schalk “Critical Disability Studies”). The inclusion of illness and disease within the (dis)ability system and within a disability studies methodology is particularly important for those studying black speculative fiction and work by marginalized writers in general because health disparities due to poverty, lack of access to health care, and discrimination within medicine means that black and other people of color are more likely to contract illnesses and diseases and more likely to experience secondary disabling health effects as a result. One of the many themes of black speculative fiction, especially Afrofuturist fiction, is how medical technologies and advancements may be used, misused, or disproportionately available to some (white, wealthy, Western) populations over other (black, brown, poor, Global South) populations.1 As a result, scholars seeking to be attentive to disability and race must include illness, disease, and the ableist, racist, sexist, and classist activities of the medical industrial complex within their understanding of the (dis)ability system. By understanding disability studies as a method to analyze (dis)ability, scholars of speculative fiction can better account for how disability is defined and redefined in non-​realist worlds where the expectations, possibilities, and limits of bodyminds are different from that in our contemporary world. In particular, scholars of speculative fiction must be able to argue that disability is specifically defined within the worlds of the texts and explore why a character should or should not be considered disabled. While some texts represent characters with realist disabilities, such as Calamity’s two fused fingers in Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms (2007), the social meanings of these realist representations of disabilities are often shifted in speculative fiction. In The New Moon’s Arms, Calamity is a “finder” and her fused fingers itch whenever she has a menopausal hot flash, after which lost things suddenly appear out of nowhere. Her disability, which has relatively little impact on her life otherwise, thus becomes tied to the magical changes occurring in her bodymind. Other texts represent characters with non-​realist disabilities like Lauren Olamina’s hyperempathy in Octavia E.  Butler’s Parable books, which readers must learn about and understand wholly from the texts alone. In the Parable books, hyperempathy is a congenital disease that causes people to feel the pain and pleasure of those around them. To the nondisabled characters in the texts, hyperempathy is considered a delusion by some and magic or extrasensory perception by others, but to the “sharers” who live with the disease in this dystopian world, it is a mostly disabling condition that is best left undisclosed except to trusted loved ones as this disability makes sharers especially vulnerable to attack and abuse. Scholars interpreting disability in black speculative fiction must be able to recognize the flexible definition of disability within each text and not assume that realist definitions of (dis) ability will apply. If we take seriously the argument that disability studies is a method rather than an object-​ oriented area of study, then scholars of black speculative fiction must also look beyond disabled characters alone. As Michael Bérubé argues “disability and ideas about disability can be and have been put to use in fictional narratives in ways that go far beyond any specific rendering of any disabled character or characters” (The Secret Life of Stories 2). These “deployments” of (dis)ability, as Bérubé refers to them, are moments at which a text engages with concepts and themes of 24

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disability and ability even in the absence of an explicitly disabled character. This is important in speculative fiction where fictional diseases, technologies, or events threaten to alter accepted aspects and norms of human bodyminds and behavior, such as the encounters with aliens in Butler’s Lilith’s Brood (2000) which produce new alien-​human hybrid children and genetically enhanced adult humans, or the technology in Nisi Shawl’s short stories “The Might Phin” and “Deep End” which places the minds and memories of prisoners, many of whom are racialized and/​or disabled, into the cloned bodies of white, wealthy nondisabled individuals who want their DNA propagated on a new planet. In each of these cases, issues of (dis)ability and race lie at the heart of human concerns with these alterations to bodyminds. The second major method for analyzing disability in black speculative fiction is to read from an intersectional perspective. This perspective pays attention to not only how systems of oppression intersect in the lives of individuals, but also how systems of oppression operate in mutually constitutive ways. In other words, in addition to approaching (dis)ability as a system of norms that is contextual and mutable within speculative fiction, scholars of black speculative fiction must also grapple with how (dis)ability intersects and mutually constitutes race as well. An intersectional perspective is attuned to how multiple systems of privilege and oppression operate in an individual’s life. In the case of interpreting fiction, therefore, one must understand, for example, a gay black disabled man character experiences ableism, racism, and homophobia alongside male privilege. This aspect of reading intersectionally operates relatively similarly in realist and non-​realist contexts, though scholars of speculative fiction must maintain an awareness that race, (dis)ability, gender, and sexuality may be defamiliarized or altered in a text and might, therefore, operate differently. Take, for example, N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy in which gods and godlings roam the mortal realm and magic exists. Here, gods and godlings have no sex or gender, though they often choose gendered presentations when in the mortal realm. In the second book, The Broken Kingdoms (2010), the main character, Oree, is described physically in a way most readers understand as black but, in the world of the text, black and African are not existing racial terms: she is Maro. Further, Oree is blind, but because she is descended from both mortals and gods, she can see magic, allowing her to move easily in spaces where magic is being used. Throughout Jemisin’s series, therefore, categories of gender, race, and (dis)ability have different meanings than in our realist world. As a result, it is important in black speculative fiction to read for how categories of oppression intersect in the lives of character, but also to understand how such categories are defined within the world of the text. An intersectional perspective, however, is not only applicable to the specific experiences of individual characters who live at the nexus of multiple oppressions. This approach also helps account for the mutually constitutive nature of race and (dis)ability: the fact that discourses of blackness and disability coproduce, reinforce, and support one another. The discursive relationship of disability and blackness historically has been used to justify various forms of violence and oppression, often under the paternalistic guise of medical or moral care and protection (Erevelles; Baynton; Dolmage). For example, both ableism and racism operate together to produce ideas around the need to contain certain populations through incarceration and institutionalization. Recognizing how racism and ableism both operate within carceral logics, without ignoring or erasing the specific histories of and differences between prisons versus psychiatric institutions, is important for solidarity and coalition. In the context of speculative fiction, looking for and dissecting the relationship of oppressions is of critical importance because non-​realist elements can easily be read as metaphors and analogies for multiple real-​world social concerns. An example of this is the X-​Men series in which mutants are ostracized and oppressed in various 25

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ways. Scholarship on the series has interpreted mutants as queer/​gay, disabled, black, Jewish, and more.2 But rather than attempting to definitively choose one real-​world group that mutants represent, it may be more productive to read the treatment and actions of mutants as emblematic of the similarities and mutual constitutions of various oppressive ideologies. In analyzing (dis) ability in black speculative fiction, it is important to elucidate how a non-​realist aspect of a text can stand in for multiple issues and thereby highlight the mutually constitutive relationship of blackness and disability. Nalo Hopkinson’s short story “Message in a Bottle” exemplifies the need for these two approaches (disability studies as method and intersectionality) in analyzing representations of disability in black speculative fiction. In the story, the narrator, Greg, provides brief vignettes about his friend’s adopted child, Kamla, over several years. Kamla is a precocious black girl with a very large head. Early in the story, Kamla is four years old and not growing physically. She is diagnosed with Delayed Growth Syndrome (DGS) alongside thousands of other children, all of whom appear several years younger than they are, but with full grown heads and incredibly high intelligence. At the end of the story, Kamla, now a ten-​year-​old with the physical stature of a six-​year-​old with an adult-​sized head, reveals to Greg that she is actually from the future, a clone sent back in time to acquire artifacts from the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. The clones were sent back as toddlers because it was more efficient to do so. They were genetically engineered to physically mature extremely slowly so that they can acquire their artifacts and live long enough to make it to the future from which they came. Throughout the story, issues of (dis)ability abound. First, Kamla’s situation exemplifies the context-​dependent nature of disability and the need to define (dis)ability within black speculative fiction. In the present world of the text, Kamla is considered disabled because of her delayed growth despite the fact that she is healthy, not in pain, and intelligent. She is subjected to frequent medical tests and treatment. Further, she is described as having no friends and being bullied at school for her large head and atypical speech and behavior which is perceived as being too adult. At the end of the story, when another person with DGS –​another clone from the future –​goes public with the truth, Kamla tells Greg, “They’re probably going to institutionalise me. All of us” (Hopkinson “Message in a Bottle” 24). Here it is clear that whether she hides the truth about who she is or admits it, Kamla will continue to be considered disabled in her present world. The perception of Kamla as disabled and people’s uncomfortable reactions to her cannot, however, be separated from her status as a black woman/​g irl. While the story is brief, one can infer that race and gender impact Kamla’s experience of disability, that her blackness and girlhood further shape why people are disturbed by her different appearance and mature speech and behavior. Kamla tells Greg that “DGS people do get abused” and that after being sent to Earth many “were never adopted, had to make [their] own way as street kids” (Hopkinson “Message in a Bottle” 17, 20). While it is unclear if all of the clones sent back in time are people of color, the disability and racialized aspects of childhood sexual abuse, difficulty in being adopted, and being put out on the street without social support networks are evident in these few details about people with DGS. The disability and race parallels between the situation of the clones and real-​world social issues underscores the ways in which reading this story intersectionally means not just thinking about Kamla’s particular identities, but also how the text gestures toward the mutually constitutive nature of race and (dis)ability. For instance, Kamla was genetically engineered to have a bodymind different from those in the future where she was born. She and the other clones are literal experiments. She explains that only about four of every ten cloned eggs was viable for implantation and only two-​thirds of those implanted resulted in a living clone. Kamla 26

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explains that the clones were treated well, educated, and informed about what their creators wanted from them. Each clone was allowed to back out, but this offer can hardly be read as a free choice at all; instead, it alludes to histories of enslavement, medical experimentation, and contemporary concerns about the ethics of genetic engineering. The clones were given two options. One, go back in time as toddlers with young adult minds and grow up there, being forever perceived as disabled while attempting to find and save artifacts for the future.Two, stay in their own present (our future) and “opt to undergo surgical procedures to correct some of the physical changes” which would allow the clones to “reach puberty normally and thereafter age like regular people” though they would “never achieve full adult height” and there would “always be something a little bit odd about their features” (Hopkinson “Message in a Bottle” 19). In either choice, the clones will be subject to intense medical scrutiny and likely be perceived as disabled forever. Like many black speculative fictional texts, Nalo Hopkinson’s “Message in a Bottle” engages a variety of social issues, particularly in regard to the ethics of advances in medical technology, in direct connection to issues of race and (dis)ability. The creation of the clones/​DGS people for the purpose of salvaging historical artifacts is not a direct parallel with slavery, but it certainly shares important power dynamics with the history of African enslavement while also containing key ethical and moral concerns of disability studies regarding eugenic projects like genetic engineering and other medical manipulations of bodyminds to achieve particular social norms or needs. This brief reading of “Message in a Bottle,” therefore, demonstrates the application of the two methods discussed above for analyzing disability in black speculative fiction: disability studies as a mode of analysis and reading from an intersectional perspective.

Conclusion Nisi Shawl writes, “Neither black nor disabled people have any reason to be enamored of the status quo. As disabled black SF authors we have the opportunity to re-​vision the dominant culture’s narrative” (“Invisible Inks” 44). Black speculative fiction writers have frequently and consistently challenged the status quo around a number of social issues. At this time, disability in black speculative fiction is less an established area of research and more a topic with exciting potential. Scholars of disability in black speculative fiction can use disability studies as a method rather than an object-​oriented area of study. This approach means understanding disability as one part of a larger (dis)ability system which defines bodymind and behavioral norms, including norms of health, illness, and disease, within particular historical and social contexts. In the worlds of speculative fiction, this means being able to define how the (dis)ability system operates within a text’s non-​realist setting to define ability and disability. Second, intersectionality is an essential critical approach for scholars of disability in black speculative fiction. In non-​realist texts this means tracing the connections between fictional oppressions, actions, and events and real-​world oppressions, actions, and events in ways that account for the intersecting and mutually constitutive nature of oppression. In other words, the representation of power dynamics in speculative fiction may gesture toward multiple historical and contemporary social issues rather than serving as a clear stand-​in for a single group or issue. Black speculative fiction is a particularly powerful way of representing things well outside accepted reality while, at the same time, keeping the representation deeply connected to the experience of black people and other marginalized groups. These two approaches to disability in black speculative fiction require being open to multiple creative interpretations which embrace the both/​and, the neither/​nor of non-​realism. Rather than being mere escapism (though the pleasure of escapism should not be discounted), 27

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black speculative fiction can be highly political and socially attuned, refusing to limit its representational possibilities to our contemporary racist, ableist, sexist, homophobic, classist, colonialist realities. The representation of disability within black speculative fiction is no exception, providing exciting, strange, and important representations of race and (dis)ability that warrant more attention and appreciation from readers and scholars alike.

Notes 1 See, for example, Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, or Koyanagi’s Ascension. 2 I make a related argument about parallels of methods of oppression in Schalk, “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘the Evening and the Morning and the Night’.” For more specifically on the various scholarly readings of X-​Men, see Schalk “Resisting Erasure” or Miller.

Works cited Allan, Kathryn. Disability in Science Fiction:  Representations of Technology as Cure. New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Arndt, Katrina, and Maia Van Beuren. “The Speed of Dark and This Alien Shore:  Representations of Cognitive Difference.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol.7, no.1, 2013, pp.89–​104. Barr, Marleen S. Afro-​ Future Females:  Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-​ Wave Trajectory. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. —​—​—​. Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. —​—​—​. Feminist Fabulation: Space/​Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Baynton, Douglas. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” The New Disability History:  American Perspectives. Eds. Longmore, Paul, and Lauri Umansky. New  York:  New  York University Press, 2001, pp.33–​57. Bérubé, Michael. “Disability and Narrative.” PMLA, vol.120, no. 2, 2005, pp.568–​76. —​—​—​. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York: New York University Press, 2016. brown, emonstr maree. “Outro.” Octavia’s Brood:  Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Eds. Imarisha, Walidah, and emonstr maree brown. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015, pp.279–​81. Butler, Octavia E. Bloodchild and Other Stories. 2nd ed. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005. —​—​—​. Lilith’s Brood. New York: Aspect/​Warner Books, 2000. —​—​—​. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007. —​—​—​. Parable of the Talents. Warner Books ed. New York: Warner Books, 2000. Cheyne, Ria. “‘She Was Born a Thing’: Disability, the Cyborg and the Posthuman in Anne Mccaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol.3, no.36, 2013, pp.138–​56. Curtis, Claire P. “Utopian Possibilities: Disability, Norms, and Eugenics in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol.9, no.1, 2015, pp.19–​33. Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future:  Afro-​Futurism 1.0.” Afro-​Future Females:  Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-​Wave Trajectory. Ed. Barr, Marleen S. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008, pp.6–​13. Dolmage, Jay. “Disabled Upon Arrival: The Rhetorical Construction of Disability and Race at Ellis Island.” Cultural Critique, vol.77, no.1, 2011, pp.24–​69. Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Comet.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. Ed. Thomas, Sheree R. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000, pp.5–​18. Erevelles, Nirmala. “Crippin’ Jim Crow:  Disability, Dis-​Location, and the School-​to-​Prison Pipeline.” Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. Eds. Ben-​Moshe, Liat, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp.81–​100. Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Warner Books, 1998. —​—​—​. “Message in a Bottle.” Report from Planet Midnight. Oakland: PM Press, 2012, pp.1–​25.

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Disability in black speculative fiction —​—​—​. The New Moon’s Arms. 1st ed. New York: Warner Books, 2007. Jackson, Sandra, and Julie E. Moody-​Freeman. “The Black Imagination and the Genres: Science Fiction, Futurism and the Speculative.” The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism, and the Speculative. Eds. Jackson, Sandra, and Julie E. Moody-​Freeman. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2011, pp.1–​14. Jarrett, Gene Andrew. Deans andTruants: Race and Realism in African American Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Jemisin, N. K. The Broken Kingdoms. Inheritance Trilogy. 1st ed. New York: Orbit, 2010. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Koyanagi, Jacqueline. Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel. Prime Books, 2013. Lavender, Isiah. Race in American Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Lubiano, Wahneema. “But Compared to What?:  Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse.” Black American Literature Forum, vol.25, no.2, 1991, pp.253–​82. Melzer, Patricia. Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Miller, P. Andrew. “Mutants, Metaphor, and Marginalism:  What X-​Actly Do the X-​Men Stand For?” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol.13, no.3, 2003, pp. 282–​90. Minich, Julie Avril. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now.” Lateral, vol.5, no.1, 2016. . Moody, Nickianne. “Untapped Potential:  The Representation of Disability/​ Special Ability in the Cyberpunk Workforce.” Convergence:  The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol.3, no.3, 1997, pp.90–​105. Nelson, Alondra. “Making the Impossible Possible:  An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson.” Social Text, vol.20, no.2, 2002, pp.97–​113. Newman-​Stille, Derek. “Where Blindness Is Not (?)  a Disability:  Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn Trilogy.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol.46, no.3, 2013, pp.43–​58. Obourn, Megan.“Octavia Butler’s Disabled Futures.” Contemporary Literature, vol.54, no.1, 2013, pp.109–​38. Pickens, Therí A. “Octavia Butler and the Aesthetics of the Novel.” Hypatia, vol.30, no.1, 2015, pp.167–​80. —​—​—​. “‘You’re Supposed to Be a Tall, Handsome, Fully Grown White Man’: Theorizing Race, Gender, and Disability in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, vol.8, no.1, 2014, pp.33–​48. Price, Margaret. “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia, vol.30, no.1, 2015, pp.268–​84. Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined:  (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. —​ —​ —​ . “Critical Disability Studies as Methodology.” Lateral, vol.6, no.1, 2016. . —​—​—​. “Experience, Research, and Writing:  Octavia E.  Butler as an Author of Disability Literature.” Palimpsest, vol.6, no.2, 2017, pp.153–​77. —​—​—​. “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘the Evening and the Morning and the Night’.” African American Review, vol.50, no.2, 2017, pp.139–​51. —​—​—​. “Resisting Erasure: Reading (Dis)Ability and Race in Speculative Media.” Routledge Companion to Disability and Media. Eds. Ellis, Katie, Gerard Goggin, Beth Haller, and Rosemary Curtis. New York: Routledge, 2019, pp.137–​46. Schuyler, George S. Black No More. Modern Library ed. New York: Modern Library, 1999. Shawl, Nisi. “Deep End.” So Long Been Dreaming. Eds. Hopkinson, Nalo, and Uppinder Mehan.Vancouver, Cananda: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004, pp.12–​22. —​—​—​. “Invisible Inks: On Black Sf Authors and Disability.” Shattering Ableist Narratives. Ed.Vanderhooft, JoSelle.Vol. 7. Wiscon Chronicles. Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2013, pp.40–​45. —​—​—​. “The Mighty Phin.” Tor.com. 2016. < www.tor.com/​2016/​06/​06/​reprints-​the-​mighty-​phin-​nisi-​ shawl/​>. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Thomas, Sheree R. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner Books, 2000. —​—​—​. Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. New York: Warner Books, 2004.

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3 t4t Toward a crip ethics of trans literary criticism Cameron Awkward-​Rich

The relationship between disability and transgender is uneven across time and space; these categories are alternately regarded as mutually exclusive, odd, or unfortunate co-​travelers, and/​ or one and the same. For example:  in the United States prior to 1990, several trans people had some, albeit quite limited, success pursuing employment discrimination claims as disabled people using the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. However, these plaintiffs’ use of the Rehabilitation Act –​and a few conservative senators’ opposition to extending civil rights protections to trans people and sexual minorities –​shaped subsequent federal disability law insofar as it prompted the carving out of “gender identity disorders” and “transvestites” exclusions in the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA (Colker 22–​68). While homosexuality and bisexuality were also excluded from coverage on the grounds that they are not impairments, the cluster of categories excluded in Section 511b were seen as mental impairments, guided as the legislators were by the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM. Consequently, within the U.S. imaginary as contoured by federal law, trans moved from being ambivalently included in disability to something much more contradictory. Namely, at the turn of the twenty-​first century, the ADA’s inclusion by means of exclusion refashioned trans into a strange kind of object: an impairment that could not be considered a protectable disability. While scholarship at the intersection of disability and transgender tends to focus on the law, in what follows, I will argue that the historically uneven relationship between these two terms is also evident in the critical bodies of scholarship that have arisen around them –​trans studies has had a great deal of trouble with disability and disability studies has had a great deal of trouble with trans. To some extent, this mutual difficulty is surprising, given that the two fields share a sensibility, arising from a shared history of capture by medical discourses and a subsequent critical stance with respect to medical models. Just as there is a vast body of work that takes disability as its object, but disability studies scholars do not recognize as disability studies, the capture of gender variance by medicine has produced, and continues to produce, a vast body of work that cannot be said to be trans studies. In both cases, the difference is one of method and of ethical/​political commitments: while medical and adjacent fields tend to approach disability and nonnormative arrangements of sex/​gender as problems of individual bodyminds to be understood, fixed, accommodated, and/​or treated, critical trans and disability studies scholars approach them as sites from which (and for which) to scrutinize “normative ideologies…with the goal of producing knowledge in support of justice for people with stigmatized bodies and minds” 31

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(Minich). In short, trans and disability studies both emerged from a rejection of medical models, which allowed for the transsexual or disabled person to emerge as a speaking subject with a history who, thus reconceived, could illuminate the broader cultural work of dis/​ability and the binary sex/​gender system. Certainly, trans and disability studies have since grown wildly from this starting place, but it continues to shape habits of thought in both fields, in remarked and unremarked ways. Within trans studies, a strong rejection of the medical model has, somewhat paradoxically, hindered an alliance between trans and disability, a dynamic that is readily apparent in the terms of decades-​long debates about whether trans people ought to pursue discrimination cases under disability law. In a document appended to the proceedings from the 1996 International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, for example, Shannon Minter and Phyllis Randolph Frye argue against “the disability rights model” in part because of a worry that doing so would “perpetuat[e]‌…the stereotype that transgendered people are inherently unstable or disturbed” and invest “mental health professionals with too much arbitrary and unchecked power over [trans] lives” (Minter and Frye, A-​2, A-​1). That is, rather than allying with critical disability scholars and activists to contest forms of control exerted over individuals designated as sick, impaired, and/​or mentally ill writ large, a significant strain of trans discourse has instead positioned disability “as the ‘real’ limitation from which [trans people] much escape” (Mitchell and Snyder 2). As it emerged from the historical mess of wider trans discourse, early transgender studies was inevitably shaped by these ongoing debates. As a result, and through the performance of “methodological distancing” that David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have argued mark the “discomforting” relationship between disability studies and other minority fields, trans studies was arguably inaugurated as an academic field through the disavowal of disability (2). Specifically, in each of what have been considered founding moments of academic trans studies  –​the publication of Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” (1992) and The Transgender Studies Reader (2006) –​transgender authority was produced through the disavowal of madness. Susan Stryker, for example, introduces The Transgender Studies Reader with an anecdote in which she attended a conference and then, “in a fog of righteous anger…leaned into the microphone on [her] side of the room and said, interrupting, ‘I’m not sick’ ” (“(De)Subjugated Knowledges” 1). In its original context, Stryker’s “I’m not sick” aimed to interrupt a line of thinking that sought to exclude trans people from queer/​feminist politics and knowledge production on the basis that they were “profoundly psychopathological individuals who mutilated their bodies and believed in oppressive gender stereotypes” (“DK” 1). In this context, “I’m not sick” functioned as a powerful speech act that cleared the room, literally and figuratively, of those who would dismiss trans people’s authority to “be taken seriously on our own terms” (Stryker “DK” 2). In turn, trans people and knowledge’s being “taken seriously” was a precondition for the existence of what has become transgender studies. At the same time, if early trans scholars sometimes staked their claim to authority by disavowing impairment, and thereby failing to consider disability as a critical vantage from which to trouble medico-​legal norms of cognition and emotion, then it is also true that some foundational work in disability studies likewise secured its epistemic authority through similar failures to consider trans as itself a critical vantage. For example: one truism in disability studies is that disability is a uniquely unfixed social category, as any of us can find ourselves inhabiting it. For this reason, disability has seemed a prime site from which to problematize a notion of “the human” as Man–​stable, autonomous, rational, and so on. Instead, thinking with disability prompts attention to the vulnerability, interdependency, and instability that characterize all human embodiment and sociality. In the course of making such arguments, some 32

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scholars invoke trans and/​or intersex bodies to prove their point. Mitchell and Snyder argue, for example, that precisely because of this characteristic instability, disability studies’ relationship to other marginalized subject positions and knowledge projects can seem strange, given that “disability was the only ‘mark’ that could impinge upon each of the other categories” (x). Anyone could become disabled, but “one could not become ‘female’ if marked ‘male’ (without radical surgery)” (Mitchell and Snyder x). Here trans, glossed by “radical surgery,” becomes evidence of the relative stability of gender: crossing the gender line is regarded as profoundly difficult, whereas anyone can cross the ability line “at any time” (Mitchell and Snyder x). Alternatively, in one of two pieces compiled in the fourth edition of The Disability Studies Reader to which an index search for transsexual/​transgender/​trans will guide a reader, Lennard Davis mobilizes trans to the opposite effect. Rather than presenting trans as evidence of gender’s relative fixity, Davis recruits it as evidence of the increasing instability of (gender) identity in the course of an argument proposing that the instability of disability is not exceptional, but a usefully generalizable condition of post-​postmodernity (267). At the turn of the century, trans tended to function in disability studies as a term that did not contain its own politics, analytics, or people; rather, similar to the trans authority garnered through the disavowal of sick, trans was a figure that could be invoked in contradictory ways in order to make claims about the interpretative authority of disability. In turn, such invocations make robust trans/​crip coalitions more difficult to imagine and mirror Alison Kafer’s observation that “trans essayist and activist Eli Clare,” who authored the second piece indexed as trans in the fourth edition of the Reader, “is widely cited in disability studies, but scholars usually treat his writings on transphobia or on transgender experiences in general as an aside to his work on disability (as if the two were not intimately, and often explicitly, intertwined)” (156). Indeed, the rhetorical place of trans within this vision of disability studies is a telling answer to Kafer’s questions: “Who is included or excluded in our political imaginaries?…Where does disability studies see or recognize itself?” (153).

Reading disability/​transgender Trans and disability, as my sketch suggests, have failed to recognize themselves in each other, a mutual failure of consideration that is symptomatic of single-​issue thinking in general, but is also quite strange, given the past and present coappearance of trans and disabled bodies in documents like the ADA and the DSM; in spaces like the asylum, the freak show, and the clinic; and in persistent binds resulting from having been made objects of medical knowledge. However, in the last decade or so, activists and scholars have begun to theorize the intersections of disability and transgender; in turn, disability and transgender studies are increasingly recognized as co-​ travelers. While this work has largely been concerned with shared sites of activism, as well as shared mechanisms of oppression, I’m going to turn here to consider one counterintuitive area in which trans and disability might recognize themselves in the other: the shared sensibility with which trans and disability studies scholars have approached the study of literature. “Disability,” writes Michael Bérubé, “demands a story” (570). The demand for narratives about and from disabled people (what happened to you?) is a pervasive feature of both the everyday world  –​endless recounting of medical history, coerced conversations with well-​ meaning strangers –​and literary cultural production. As a device of characterization, evidence of a mystery to be solved, a source of textual conflict, and so on,“disability,” Mitchell and Snyder argue, “inaugurates the act of interpretation” and “calls a story into being” (6, 55). The trouble for literary disability studies scholars, then, is not that there is a paucity of representations of disability in dominant literature/​culture; rather, the trouble is that disability seems “tethered to 33

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inciting the act of meaning-​making itself,” which reinforces the everyday sense that disabilities are signs to be interpreted, stand in for something other than themselves (Mitchell and Snyder 6). In turn, the disabled body as sign underlies much of the dehumanizing treatment of disabled people throughout Anglo-​American history –​from the freak show to the eugenic imaginary –​ and is at odds with recognizing the humanity, what Avery Gordon has called the “complex personhood,” of disabled folks (4). Literary and other cultural critics in trans studies face a similar problem, as trans, too, demands a story. Although transgender is a relatively recent category, the phenomena of sex/​ gender “crossing” and ambiguity are not. Thus, from Tiresias, to stories of enslaved persons’ cross-​dressed flights for freedom, to Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928), what we might now call trans characters, practices, and plots abound (cf. Snorton 55–​98). However, as Emma Heaney has argued, since at least the mid-​nineteenth century capture of gender variance by sexology, trans has circulated as fundamentally figural, allegorical. The very fact that some people live “at odds” with the sex they were assigned has been rendered –​like other deemed-​monstrous bodies –​“an enigma that invites investigation” (Heaney 5). Such investigations, in turn, promise to teach a non-​trans us about gender writ large, “demonstrating the contingency and constructedness of gender through being positioned as privileged objects of inquiry” (Malatino 403). Today, the abstraction of trans lives into figures of gender’s contingency or transgressive potential pervades many discursive spheres –​from the classroom, to the clinic, to the novel –​and as scholars like Vivian Namaste have argued, even trans-​affirmative uses of the trans allegory necessarily capture a flattened image of trans life, in which it is always about “challenging the sex/​gender system,” never about “the banality of buying some bread, of making photocopies, of getting your shoe fixed” (Sex Change 25). In this way, trans is rendered figural through the assumption that a trans person’s “very existence means something outside itself,” an assumption that works against the ability to conceive of trans lives as actually lived (Heaney 6). As a result of these protocols of reading trans and disabled bodies, scholars in both fields have evinced the desire for, and tendency toward, what Bérubé calls “literalism, even censorious literalism” (570). Within trans studies, the desire for literalism has manifested in everything from reading practices that urge us to suppose that trans-​authored narratives might transparently and “simply” communicate “what transsexuality feels like,” to disparagements of “the field of literary criticism” altogether for “fanc[ying trans lives] to be merely symbolic” (Prosser 69; Stryker “DK” 2; cf. Namaste “Tragic Misreadings”). Paralleling this slide from collapsing the real and the representational into critiques of literary criticism writ large, Bérubé has also pointed out that the habit within disability studies of critiquing figural uses of disability for failing “to do justice to the actual lived experiences of people with disabilities” seems, taken to its most extreme register, at odds “with the enterprise of professional literary study, dedicated as so much of it is to the interpretation of the figural” (570).While this tension has produced innovative scholarship within both fields that propose trans and/​or crip practices of reading and approaches to metaphor, this shared status as deeply and problematically linked to the figural is one window into the function of much of the literature that is self-​consciously trans and/​or crip. For example, we might understand the proliferation of trans and disability life writing within this frame, as it is a form that fleshes metaphor out, replaces a figure with a complex person. Additionally, we might understand the contemporary prominence of poetry within trans and disability culture as having to do with poetry’s status as a mode more or less made of the figural. For persons who have been made into figures, poetry is an ideal site to insist that “the always overdetermined metaphoric uses of disability [and transgender] efface and distort the lived experiences of people” and to turn these metaphoric uses inside-​out (Garland-​Thomson “Feminist Disability Studies” 1565). 34

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But the problem with disability metaphors and trans allegories is not only the emptying out of lived experience; it’s also a problem of the ordering of narrative, of time. That is, trans bodies are not only asked to bear the burden of allegorizing gender. Rather, as bodies linked to the very idea of transition, trans protagonists often also function as figures for the post-​modern/​post-​ colonial/​globalized world and its discontents. This linking of individual narratives of transition to world-​historical ones underlies Jack Halberstam’s observation that “the transgender body has emerged as futurity itself, a kind of fulfillment of post-​modern promises of gender flexibility” (18).While Halberstam understands this figuration of gender-​flexibility-​as-​futurity to be deeply contradictory insofar as it promises liberation while precisely imitating the constraining demands of neoliberalism, to live out this figuration means inhabiting a deeply contradictory temporality, embodying “futurity itself ” in present tense. Indeed, one of the consequences of the construction of trans as futurity is that trans people can be, and often are, understood as perpetually new inventions. Thus cut off from the past, trans easily comes to represent a future that can be warded off –​in the temporal logic of conservative legislation as well as in some past and present lesbian feminist speculative fiction (cf. Salah 212–​15) –​rather than a present reality. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the figuration of trans-​as-​futurity can make more difficult the work guaranteeing a future for trans people. In a related temporal bind, disability is persistently linked to the present imperfect, in the grammatical sense of “an uncompleted action taking place at the present time,” as well as the resonant sense of the flawed present (OED). As Alison Kafer argues, “the idea that a future with disability is a future no one wants” is presented as a self-​evident statement in dominant cultural imaginaries, ranging from individual narratives of overcoming disability, to biomedical discourses of cure or preemption, to speculative discourses of human perfectibility (2). Such discourses rely on a notion of disability as a present-​tense individual (or society-​wide) problem to be resolved; for this reason, disability cannot exist in the “good” futures these projects imagine because a future with disability is “a future that bears too many traces of the ills of the present” (2). We might understand this writing of disability in the present imperfect as adhering to a particular, and particularly dominant, narrative logic: if an unruly body is often the impetus for narration, then many plots –​literary and otherwise –​are moved along by the desire to resolve the “problem,” to get that body under control. Davis has gone so far to suggest that such “normalizing devices of plot [that] bring characters back into the norms of society” is but one of several elements of the modern novel that make it an inherently ableist form, while scholars as different as Sandy Stone and Bernice Hausman were likewise concerned that transsexual autobiographies’ tendency to work toward a resolution of body and mind necessarily upholds normative constructions of sex/​gender (Davis “Introduction” 12; cf. Stone 159; Hausman 346–​ 347). These are critical habits of thought that emphasize the present imperfect of disability vs. the looming futurity of trans to be held at bay. This trouble with time has, in turn, produced speculative fiction as a potent site of trans/​ crip cultural production and critique, both because it is a mode of imagining “escape[s]‌from the current world” and alternate possibilities for trans and disabled life and because it invites the reordering of time by sci-​fi devices (time machines) and narrative devices (expanded time frames, apocalyptic disruptions) (Fitzpatrick and Plett 440). In the following section, I’m going to depart from the rhetorical mode of analogy that has so far structured my overview of the field –​and, indeed, marks much of the way trans and disability are thought together –​by asking a different kind of question. Not, “how is trans like disability (and vice versa)” but rather, “what might being oriented by disability studies direct us, as trans literary critics, to do?” Although there is not space, here, to arrive at an answer, I’ll reflect on the question by turning to just such a piece of speculative fiction, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (2016), a self-​published novella 35

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written by Torrey Peters, which both exemplifies and allegorizes the status of trans literature in the twenty-​first century.

Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones Like much speculative fiction, InfectYour Friends and Loved Ones is propelled by a thought experiment, one that makes a metaphor literal by fleshing out a habit of speech. What if, Peters asks, transness were literally a sickness, a contagion, as various anti-​trans contingents claim? To answer this question, Peters –​via her trans women characters –​invents a genetically-​modified superbug that eventually renders everyone in the world unable to produce their own sex hormones, dependent on exogenous ones, so in a “trans” position in the bioeconomy. Focalized through an unnamed trans woman, Infect Your Friends alternates between three time frames –​years before, years after, and the day of the bug’s release  –​in order to tell a story about a failure of care between two trans women amidst the society-​wide failure to care for trans women. These failures of care compound to produce a narrative animated by what Susan Stryker calls “transgender rage,” a structure of feeling aimed, at once, at the impossible destruction of the world and the necessary transformation of the self. As such, “transgender rage furnishes a means for disidentification with compulsorily assigned subject positions. It makes the transition from one gendered subject position to another” from, potentially, any subject position to another, “possible by using the impossibility of complete subjective foreclosure to organize an outside force as an inside drive…Through the operation of rage, the stigma itself becomes the source of transformative power” (Stryker “My Words” 249). In Infect Your Friends transgender rage plays out these destructive aims and ameliorative possibilities at the scale of the social; Peters’ characters respond to the “necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against [trans] survival” by literally destroying the order of things, in the shadow of which emerges a partial, tentative world organized by other ethics (Stryker “My Words” 244). Infect Your Friends centers on the relationship between the unnamed protagonist and another trans woman named Lexi, who have very little in common aside from being trans. Before her transition, the protagonist was living out an ordinary, liberal ideal:  she lived with her long-​ term girlfriend, had a grandmother who passed down wealth, and was getting a PhD from Dartmouth. Transition prompts this world’s withdrawal from her: her girlfriend will no longer touch her, her parents vanish from her story, she drops out of school. The trouble is that, like every melancholic transsexual before her, she is still attached to this order of things, she does not know what else she might be. And so she moves to Seattle to live out a fantasy of a different version of the normative good life, playing at being “a rich dude’s housewife,” living rent-​free in said rich dude’s spare apartment in exchange for sex “for about two hours, three times a month” (33, 34). These are wildly different life arrangements, but Peters’ placing them side-​by-​side, the latter as compensation for the loss of the former, suggests that logic of the latter (“the good life” in exchange for living at the whim of another’s desire) is really only an iteration of the logic of the former (“the good life” in exchange for living within the circumscribed, naturalized order). But if the protagonist is willing to circumscribe her agency and her affect in order to remain partially, tentatively attached to the terms of her former life, then Lexi does precisely the opposite. Rather than remaking herself to fit the terms of the world, everywhere Lexi goes she attempts to remake the world to fit her self; she is the embodiment of transgender rage. Like Frankenstein’s monster, she is deeply scarred, making visible the damage that has occurred in order for her to exist. Likewise, the houses she inhabits are described as in a state of abjection –​ the spaces she makes are variously described as “falling down,” “on the edge,” “marred” (16, 21). Though the two become friends, perhaps even lovers, after arranging a meeting on Craigslist, 36

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Lexi’s method of living is disgusting to the protagonist: she is at once “fascinated and repelled” (23). Sianne Ngai’s gloss of Kant’s definition of disgust describes well the pair’s dynamic: “what makes [Lexi] abhorrent is precisely [her] outrageous claim for desirability. The disgusting seems to say, ‘You want me,’ imposing [herself] on the [narrator] as something to be mingled with and perhaps even enjoyed” (Ngai 335). However, the definite rejection of Lexi that the narrator’s disgust should produce is held off by various forms of proximity (categorical, geographical, emotional) between the two. Plainly, they are both trans and lonely. Eventually, though, after Lexi follows the narrator to Seattle, the two have a falling out around their divergent priorities. Lexi sets out to build a life with other trans women in Seattle while the narrator continues to fold herself into the cis logics of the world. In several ways, Infect Your Friends reverses the trans disavowal of disability that I identified above in order to offer a cripped trans narrative. Briefly, I understand crip as both a mode of critique and a gesture toward doing otherwise. As a mode of critique, cripping trans involves, following Carrie Sandahl, “spinning [the narrative habits of trans discourse] to reveal able-​ bodied” and able-​minded “assumptions and exclusionary effects” (37). At the same time, to crip, like to queer, is not only to point out and reject exclusionary assumptions, but also to inhabit, somewhat extravagantly, the debased position in order to understand what politics, ethics, might look like, from that perspective. In these terms, Infect Your Friends is a cripped trans narrative in two, interrelated ways. First, Peters employs what Alexandre Barile has termed “a composite model of transness,” which, following similar propositions in disability studies, understands trans suffering as emerging both from the cisgenderist organization of society and “the debilitating aspects of transness” –​dysphoria, post-​surgical pain, etc. –​that would likely persist even in other worlds (71, 67). In Peters’ novella, that is, transfeminine embodiment is a distinctly impaired kind of bodymind, one marked by physical scarring, ungainly bodily comportment, and unruly post-​traumatic affect. But, while this form of trans embodiment is partially produced by disabling social conditions, the very conceit of the novella undermines a purely social model of trans suffering since, far from being resolved by a new social organization, trans debility comes to be a defining condition of all human life. Ungainliness, instability, and scarring are central to, never disavowed from, Infect Your Friends’ image of trans. This is the second way that Infect Your Friends crips trans: through the narrator and Lexi, Peters stages an encounter between two strategies of trans living and politics, one which strives to hide its difference in order to meet the world on its terms and one which displays its scars in order to insist on a different world. In Alison Kafer’s words, this latter image of trans politics is “a politics of crip futurity” insofar as it both imagines disability in the future and also understands disability as providing a form of knowledge that might help shape what that future should be (3). Indeed, eventually, after being routinely faced with external circumstances that work against her own survival, the narrator, too, comes to embody trans rage, to be sick and scarred, and it is this transformation that ushers in the new world. The novella thus ends, and the world in the novella thus ends, with a transformation of the narrator’s affect from melancholia to rage: she fully withdraws her attachment to this world, cannot any longer bear to let it go on. While the narrator, newly infected by Lexi with the world-​ending pathogen, has the power to utterly rearrange the social order, Peters, as her author and her double, also takes up the imperative of the novella’s title. That is, the widespread failure to care for trans women is not only represented within the plot, but also shapes the literary marketplace in which the novella emerged. Just as the narrator finds herself moved from an authorized space of literary/​cultural production upon her transition, Peters is a graduate of one of the most authorizing literary institutions (Iowa Writer’s Workshop), but was prompted to self-​publish her work because, as she puts it, “the publishing industry doesn’t serve trans 37

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women” (75). In an interview, Peters elaborates that self-​publication allows her to participate in the literary economy in a way that reflects her primary, imagined audience –​other trans woman (“(Trans) Love”). Only outside of authorized spaces of literary production has Peters felt she is able to tell stories in a way that accurately captures the mess of trans lives, ones that might be emotionally resonant to a trans audience but not necessarily a cis one. Further, self-​publication allows her to distribute her work on a sliding scale, making trans lit accessible to a disproportionally impoverished trans population. InfectYour Friends, then, both exemplifies and allegorizes the present status of trans lit. Like her characters, Peters finds herself pushed into informal economies, having gathered tools (training, networks, genetically modified pathogens) from authorized and authorizing institutions to be used for her own purposes. And so, just as the novella spirals toward a theory of how a trans woman might “relate with other trans women in ways that don’t feel so fraught that [their] anger might end the world,” Peters’ publication method likewise spirals toward a theory of less fraught ways of producing and circulating art, one that can imagine a trans woman as its ideal audience (Peters “Uncut”). Both the object and the method ask: given the catastrophe of this world, what would it mean to produce a world for one another, to care?

t4t Care is a concept that spans the material and the affective. It is both a form of labor and an attitude that one takes up with respect to another. Because it is often assumed that, in order for the labor of care to be performed well, it must be accompanied by a genuine caring affect, care as an ethical demand or transparent good is complicated along gendered and racial lines. Because they have historically done the (low-​paid and unpaid) labor of care, women and racialized people of all genders have been, at various historical moments, constructed as naturally more caring which, in turn, is used to reify this unequal distribution of labor, power, and capital. However, on the other side of what Nirmala Erevelles has called “the dialectic of care,” care is also a fraught concept within disability studies (194). Without rehashing the whole debate, it’s sufficient to know that care is fraught because of the long history of violence against disabled populations that has been legitimized through the idiom of “care.” That is, the perception of disabled people as dependent on the care of others has been central to ongoing forms of exclusion, violence, and denial of bodily autonomy. At the same time, the reality that some disabled people are dependent on the care of others has prompted a compelling line of thinking about how disability –​precisely because it is at the heart of both the necessity and potential violence of care  –​provides a potent site from which to reconceptualize ethical models of care. This conversation about care has only recently been taken up by trans studies, though conversations about healthcare, community building in light of trans trauma, transgender children’s bodily autonomy, and so forth, would benefit from thinking rigorously about the ethics of care (cf. Marvin). What ought care look like between doctors and trans patients, between parents and trans children, between trans people ourselves? How, given unequal distributions of power and resources –​as well as the effects of these disabling conditions –​might we relate to each other in ways that “don’t feel so fraught”? In the shadow of the end of the world, and the ongoing apocalypse of the present, Infect Your Friends proposes the ethic of “t4t” as one answer to these questions about intracommunity care. Recycled from Craigslist personals lingo, t4t means, simply, trans for trans. Online, t4t tends to denote an erotic orientation or practice, but in Peters’ novella it also becomes an ethos around which a group of trans women organize themselves in the post-​contagion world where, otherwise, the notion of community has utterly broken down. As an organizing principle, t4t works 38

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because no one expects it to produce a utopian form: when the narrator exclaims, “That sounds like some kind of trans girl utopia,” she’s met with laughter: Please.You’ve met a trans woman before, right? Do you think the words trans women and utopia ever go together in the same sentence?…We aim high, trying to love each other and then we take what we can get.We settle for looking out for each other. And even if we don’t all love each other, we mostly all respect each other. (54) The incredulous rejection of the idea of a trans girl utopia ought to be read as commentary on the way transgender bodies have historically been used as a mark of dystopia or utopia gone awry, but also as a sincere recognition of human limits. Further, despite the language of “love” and “respect,” t4t does not only refer to the fulfillment of affective needs. In fact, while Infect Your Friends closes with the narrator’s trans rage ending the world, it opens with her cultivating the skills necessary to steal and raise hormone-​producing pigs, to do “T4T for real. [Provide] Hormones for the girls” (67). Love and respect turn out to mean committing to the redistribution of material resources in order to commit oneself to the total well-​being of another. This definition of caring, which solicits us not despite but because of our own and others’ limitations, is deeply resonant of Margaret Price’s crip gloss of care: “care means moving together and being limited together” (279). While Peters insists that Infect Your Friends is motivated by the present desire for more ethical transfeminine community forms, it is striking that enacting t4t “for real” seems to require the end of the world, an utter reorganization of interpersonal, social, and economic logics. But, if this is a story also about the status of trans lit, then I’d like to conclude by suggesting that, while turning to this novella for models of ethical community forms is impractical at best, it is instructive for thinking about ethical ways of doing the labor of literary criticism. Briefly, in the second decade of the twenty-​first century, small independent presses, journals, and online platforms that allow authors like Peters to distribute work outside of the press model, are making something called “trans lit” possible. At the same time, trans literary criticism is in its fledgling form, and there are many questions about how the field ought to proceed, about what might constitute the trans literary archive. Or, as Alexander Eastwood has put it, while trans studies is, we’re told, flourishing, it “has yet to flourish in literary contexts” (593). For Eastwood, this discrepancy is the product of a methodological mismatch –​whereas contemporary literary criticisms tend to privilege the reader as the location of meaning-​making, caring for trans people requires a resistance to the trans allegory and a commitment to interpretative contexts in which trans people can determine (or, at least, meaningfully guide) how we are to be read. If this is a methodological problem, it’s no surprise that Eastwood offers a methodological solution. He proposes that trans literary critics and trans bookworms of all sorts read not for identity but for resonance, looking not to excavate trans characters where there may be none, but instead “trac[ing] how certain problems, ideas, strategies, or aesthetics that structure contemporary experiences of transsexuality find expression in literary history” (Eastwood 595). Impatient with the limited trans literary archive, Eastwood prioritizes trans readers and practices of reading over trans texts. In light of the problem of trans allegory, Eastwood’s turn to trans reading does more than grant trans lit crit a vast archive:  it also insists on the reality of trans life. Transness, in his account, is not a sign to be read but rather a position from which to read. But, in making this turn, Eastwood continues an unremarked on habit of trans literary criticism, insofar as he turns us away from the archive of trans creative production that is ever-​expanding in all temporal directions. Indeed, from its oft-​claimed inauguration in Sandy Stone’s “The Empire Strikes 39

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Back,” trans studies has arguably approached trans representation in general –​and text-​based representation in particular –​driven by the critical affects of suspicion and shame. For example, though it is much more than this, Stone’s essay can be read as an apologetic explanation for the (political) limits of actually existing trans autobiographies, an apology which hopes to bring into existence new trans genres more adequate to Stone’s radical desires. Nearly two decades later, Eastwood too narrates his impatience with the trans literary archive, so finds himself returning to Stone’s foundational question and turning it inside-​out: “How can the transsexual speak?” becomes “how, then, might the transsexual read?” (Stone 164; Eastwood 592). Both are vital questions, but both also side-​step actually existing trans lit: Stone holds out hope for a future object that will be adequate to her desires while Eastwood develops a practice of reading that will make potentially any object able to fill the trans desire for history, making nearly any text “our own” (duCille 33). Notably, Eastwood, too, presents his argument as enabling a form of care. In particular, he suggests that reading for resonance “enables strange kinships between readers and texts, kinships that act as salves” for the melancholic trans reader, like Peters’ protagonist (602). The salve of resonant reading, then, is offered as a technology of self-​care, one that might fill the real, affective need to see oneself as a viable subject in this world. However, in the hope of fulfilling the emotional needs of the self, resonant reading might actually encourage trans critics to turn away from the emotional and material needs of a wider trans we composed of authors, texts, presses, students, and so forth. Of course, I am not arguing that trans lit crit should –​or even could –​ solely focus on trans-​authored work; rather, that eschewing “identity” altogether as a rubric for determining how the intellectual/​emotional resources of academic trans lit crit are to be distributed, we risk leaving the largely un-​or low-​paid labor of trans lit’s care almost entirely to those of us whose labor and living is even more precarious. My earlier gesture to Ann duCille’s retrospective on black feminist criticism is meant to indicate that these anxieties about literature of “our own” are certainly not peculiar to trans studies; however, they are unfolding in the present tense and alongside an unprecedented consolidation of something called trans lit. Given this context, I would like to ask a third question: if “care means moving together and being limited together,” then what might it mean for trans literary critics to approach their objects not with suspicion nor impatience, but with critical care? Understanding t4t as a crip ethics of trans lit crit, in particular, might loosen this requirement that our objects meet all of our (political, personal, aesthetic) needs; instead, it might prompt us to consider ourselves in an unsteady, uneven, but nonetheless reciprocal relation. Further, just as disability theory prompts us to regard the limits of a bodymind in relation to the environment that may or may not “sustain the shape and function of the body that enters it,” we might ask, for example, “What do the limitations of this object tell us about the shape of the world in which it exists?” (Garland-​Thomson “Misfits” 594). That is, although we speak intuitively of the lives of books, as critics we tend to underplay our role in sustaining those lives through our forms of attention. But literary criticism –​“unproductive,” sustaining labor that it is –​is, or can be, a form of care work, both for better and for worse.Texts too require care, both the affect and the labor; they need, in short, the care work of literary criticism.

Works cited Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Public Law 101–​336. 108th Congress, 2nd session (July 26, 1990). Baril, Alexandre. “Transness as Debility:  Rethinking Intersections Between Trans and Disabled Embodiments.” Feminist Review vol. 11, no. 1, 2015, pp. 59–​74. Bérubé, Michael. “Disability and Narrative.” PMLA vol. 120, no. 2, 2005, pp. 568–​576.

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t4t: toward a crip ethics Colker, Ruth. The Disability Pendulum:  The First Decade of the Americans with Disabilities Act. New  York University Press, 2005. Davis, Lennard J. “Introduction: Disability, Normality, and Power.” In The Disability Studies Reader 4th ed., edited by Lennard J. Davis. Routledge, 2013, pp.1–​14. —​—​—​. “The End of Identity Politics: On Disability as an Unstable Category.” In The Disability Studies Reader 4th ed., edited by Lennard J. Davis. Routledge, 2013, pp. 263–​277. duCille, Ann. “The Short Happy Life of Black Feminist Theory.” Differences vol. 21, no. 1, 2010, pp. 32–​47. Eastwood, Alexander. “How, Then, Might the Transsexual Read? Notes toward a Trans Literary History.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly vol. 1, no. 4, 2014, pp. 590–​604. Erevelles, Nirmala. Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Fitzpatrick, Cat, and Casey Plett. “Afterword.” In Meanwhile, Elsewhere:  Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, edited by Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett. Topside Press, 2017, pp. 439–​440. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs vol. 30, no. 2, 2005, pp. 1557–​1587. —​—​—​. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia vol. 26, no. 3, 2011, pp. 591–​609. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imaginary. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University Press, 2005. Hausman, Bernice L. “Body, Technology, and Gender in Transseuxal Autobiographies.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. Routledge, 2006, 335–​361. Heaney, Emma. The New Woman:  Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory. Northwestern University Press, 2017. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013. Malatino, Hilary. “Pedagogies of Becoming: Trans Inclusivity and the Crafting of Being.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly vol. 2, no. 3, 2015, pp. 395–​410. Marvin, Amy. “Groundwork for Transfeminist Care Ethics: Sara Ruddick,Trans Children, and Solidarity in Dependency.” Hypatia vol. 34, no.1, 2019, pp. 101–​120. Minich, Julie Avril. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now,” Lateral no. 5.1, 2016, https://​doi. org/​10.25158/​L5.1.9. Accessed May 25, 2017. Minter, Shannon, and Phyllis Randolph Frye. “Appendix A: GID and the Transgender Movement.” Fifth International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy. July 1996. Digital Transgender Archive, www.digitaltransgenderarchive. net/​files/​ 44558d38d. Accessed February 13, 2018. Mitchell, David T, and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis:  Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. University of Michigan Press, 2000. Namaste, Viviane K. “‘Tragic Misreadings’: Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgender Subjectivity.” Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. 9–​23. —​—​—​. Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions & Imperialism. Women’s Press, 2005. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005. Peters, Torrey. Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. Self-​published, CreateSpace, 2016. —​—​—​. “(Trans) Love and Other Scars,” interview by Kai Cheng Thom. Autostraddle, February 20, 2017, www.autostraddle.com/​trans-​love-​and-​other-​scars-​an-​interview-​with-​torrey-​ peters-​author-​of-​ infect-​your-​friends-​and-​loved-​ones-​369764. Accessed February 12, 2018. —​—​—​.“The Autostraddle Interview, Uncut,” by Kai Cheng Thom. Torrey Peters, February 21, 2017, www. torreypeters.com/​2017/​02/​21/​the-​autostraddle-​interview. Accessed February 12, 2018. “present, adj. and adv.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, January 2018, www.oed.com/​view/​Entry/​ 150679. Accessed February 13, 2018. Price, Margaret. “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 268–​284. Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. Columbia University Press, 1998. Salah, Trish. “Backlash to the Future: Screening Transsexuality as Fundamentalism.” TOPIA vol. 25, 2011, pp. 212–​222. Sandahl, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 9, no. 1–​2, 2003, pp.  25–​56. Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies vol. 10, no. 3, 1992, 150–​176.

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For more at the intersection of disability/​transgender, see also: Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A:  Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2001. Barry, Kevin M. “Disabilityqueer:  Federal Disability Rights Protection for Transgender People.” Yale Human Rights and Development Journal vol. 16, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–​50. Clare, Eli. “Body Shame, Body Pride: Lessons from the Disability Rights Movement,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura. Routledge, 2013, pp. 261–​265. Gorton, R. Nick. “Transgender as Mental Illness:  Nosology, Social Justice, and the Tarnished Golden Mean.” The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura. Routledge, 2013, pp. 644–​652. Mog, Ashley, and Amanda Lock Swarr. “Threads of Commonality in Transgender and Disability Studies.” Disability Studies Quarterly vol. 28, no. 4, 2008, http://​dsqsds.org/​article/​view/​152/​152. Puar, Jasbir. “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled.” Social Text vol. 33, no. 3, 2015, pp. 45–​73. Sears, Clare.“Electric Brilliancy: Cross-​dressing Law and Freak Show Displays in Nineteenth-​Century San Francisco.” In The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura. Routledge, 2013, pp. 554–​564. Serlin, David. Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America. University of Chicago Press, 2004. West, Issac. Tranforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law. New York University Press, 2014.

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4 CHALLENGING PHONOCENTRISM Writing signs and bilingual Deaf literatures Kristen Harmon What is Deaf literature? How can written literary works be deaf? Many readers of English texts may never have asked themselves questions like these about reading and writing:  how can written literature  –​a poem, play, short story, novel, or other creative forms  –​be Deaf (and signing)? How can it have been hearing (and speaking) to begin with? Many readers of literature likely already know about groupings of literature related to identity, history, experience, even language: Latino/​a literature, GLBTQ+ literature, Women’s literature, literatures of the African diaspora, and so on. Maybe readers and students already know about American Sign Language (ASL) performances, but those are filmed texts using video and digital technology. Deaf literature, in print, is something else altogether. Or is it? Writing and reading, as solitary, “quiet,” activities do not, at first glance, lend themselves to discussions of audition, language, and hearing status. But like other bilingual or multilingual literatures, Deaf literature and the literature of sign language peoples  –​as written by those who are fluent in a signed language, regardless of hearing status, as in the case of adult children of deaf adults (CODAs) –​have the potential to make us think twice about the norms and conventions of English literature and writing.The multiple literacies of bilingual or multilingual Deaf people are uniquely embodied and intertextual in ways that highlight assumptions about human languages and expose the phonocentric underpinnings of how we talk about language and textuality in written literature. Phonocentrism is the assertion that “the primacy of speech and phonetic writing in language is not a ‘natural’ human attribute, but the result of a metaphysical and historical prejudice” (Bauman, “Listening” para. 1). After all, one of the “foundational ableist myths of our society [is that] the norm for humans is to speak and hear” (qtd. in Esmail, Reading Victorian Deafness 4). Thanks to the increased representation of Deaf, signing, characters in popular culture, media, and literature, contemporary readers will likely bring to their reading of Deaf literature a more contextualized and nuanced understanding of deafness in relation to sign language. Many people understand that some deaf people “speak” sign language; others may know a little more: that signed languages are a core component of identity and cultural affiliation for many Deaf people in English-​using cultures and nations. In describing deaf, Deaf, and hard of hearing people, the use of the lowercase in the descriptor, “deaf,” generally refers to only the sensory status of deafness, and the use of the uppercase, as in Deaf, denotes those who are signers and members

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of the Deaf community, a sociolinguistic community. Deaf writers are necessarily bilingual, at minimum. This chapter argues that Deaf literary and creative writing poses a challenge to the phonocentric norms of English language literature, and indeed, of many Western literatures. Study of writing strategies from historical and contemporary Deaf bilingual ASL-​English authors show that they have found ways to highlight, challenge, and subvert pervasive phonocentrism. English literature does not have to be oral/​aurally-​based; indeed, rather than a constant display of “hearing loss,” instead, contemporary Deaf writers show the concept of “Deaf gain” –​the flipside of this binary –​in action. Deaf gain is the idea that sensory, linguistic, physical, and cognitive differences can have intellectual, creative, and cultural benefits; indeed, such differences are vital to humanity and human creative endeavors (Bauman and Murray xv). Deaf and sign language literatures are not simply one thing or another; they are multifaceted, changeable, and contested. Clearly, the canon of Deaf literature is developed by people who use sign language; hearing status may vary, but the most common feature is the shared sociocultural linguistic community of sign language speakers. Generally, sign language literatures can be described as the literary, creative, and verbal arts forms of a particular sign language community. Currently, there is no firm definition of what constitutes Deaf literature, though in recent years there has been the emergence of a loose consensus in Deaf Studies that, broadly, deaf literature is distinct from sign language literary and creative forms; as such, deaf literature consists of written works by and about deaf people (Donne 660). Sign language literatures, in contrast, are those linguistically-​and culturally-​determined verbal arts/​non-​spoken oral traditions that are performed and recorded in visual media, as in American Sign Language poetry, number stories, ABC stories, narratives, and so on; these are examples of what Benjamin Bahan calls “face-​to-​ face tradition” (Bahan 22). Some scholars, however, use “Deaf literature” –​describing bilingual writers who are also members of the DEAF-​WORLD –​as an umbrella term for both written and signed creative works, including verbal arts/​oral traditions (Peters 3). Other scholars note the hybrid nature of many written works by sign language peoples; their written texts incorporate features of signed languages and verbal arts traditions, and as such, “Deaf lit.” occupies a complex and creative middle ground between signed and written languages (Holcomb 134). The idea of a literature canon is similarly flexible, but still determined by culturally-​determined parameters. This chapter addresses the written literature of Deaf writers who are fluent in American Sign Language and who are writing in English. As bilinguals or multilinguals, Deaf and signing writers incorporate features from both signed and spoken/​written languages. Deafness and hearing loss is not that unusual, despite the often-​stereotyped characterization of deaf people in visual and print media as being completely isolated or significantly marginalized. It is estimated that, currently, two to three out of every 1,000 babies are born with some level of hearing loss, and that overall numbers of deaf and hard of hearing people in the United States are around 27.7 million (“Quick Statistics about Hearing”). However, most deaf and hard of hearing people do not sign. Ironically, though, American Sign Language is the third most studied language in colleges and universities across the United States, coming just behind Spanish and French (Goldberg, Looney, and Lusin 2). Despite the popularity of ASL for hearing language students, the number of native and fluent signers within the deaf population is small; estimates for members of the DEAF-​WORLD, the sociocultural community of signers in the United States, range from 250,000 to 500,000 (Mitchell, Young, Bachleda, & Karchmer 318). The DEAF-​WORLD is a gloss, or a loose translation, on the American Sign Language phrase that means the shared culture, language, knowledge, traditions, networks, and community of sign language peoples; because of the focus on relationships between signers who are spread throughout the United States –​and the world –​and who can communicate “face to 44

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face” through visual technology, it is not limited to a region (Bahan, Lane, and Hoffmeister, ­chapter 1). The DEAF-​WORLD is, in written English and in mainstream visual media, often portrayed as being in contact –​and conflict –​with its analogue, the HEARING-​WORLD. Signed languages are human languages in their own right; as with spoken languages, signed languages have their own unique linguistic structure, complete with all of the expected structural features of human languages: phonology, morphology, grammar, and so on. They are not manually-​coded forms of English or other spoken languages. Emerging as they do from a community of language users over time, signed languages are specific to their community of users; there is no single or universal sign language, as such. There is, instead, American Sign Language (ASL), Langue des Signes Française (LSF), British Sign Language (BSL), Japanese Sign Language, Kenyan Sign Language, Ukrainian Sign Language, Kolkata Sign Language, among others. However, there is a limited-​lexicon, agreed-​upon, pidgin system of signs from different countries called International Sign (IS), typically used for international meetings of Deaf people, but IS is not a substitute for a full-​fledged sign language. In many ways, deafness, speech, sign language, and written literature are contact zones; a helpful starting point for this discussion on deafness and literature is the idea of the “hearing line,” or what Christopher Krentz calls the “invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people” (Krentz, Writing 2). Literature is one of the mechanisms for enforcing or for subverting the norms of the hearing line; indeed, reading and writing provide a kind of “meeting ground… between deaf and hearing people, a place where differences may recede and binaries may be transcended” (Krentz, Writing 16). Rachel Mazique and Julie Minich propose the idea of there being “literatures of the ‘hearing line,’ ” or what as the multiple texts and representations that demarcate and reinforce the hearing line (Mazique, personal correspondence). Many of the works discussed in this chapter are, in effect, “literatures of the hearing line.”

“The hearing line” in literature Before the 1860s in the United States, deafness was most commonly understood as an “affliction,” and many, including Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, an early and deeply influential advocate for Deaf education in America, learned signs for the purposes of bringing Christianity and the gospel to “isolated” Deaf people (Baynton 15, 18). After the end of the Civil War in the 1860s, however, a shift towards the development of a national identity in the face of resistance towards “foreignness” and fears related to immigration led to the rise of assimilation through means of oralism, or the exclusive use of spoken language in deaf education, as opposed to manualism, or the use of signs (Baynton 16, 29). From the 1880s onwards, an active campaign to suppress sign language in favor of oralism was perpetuated through linguistic Darwinism and unfounded eugenic fears of a “deaf variety of the human race” (despite the fact that the overwhelming percentage of deaf people are born to hearing people) (Baynton 31, 37, 40). At the turn of the century, in 1899, sign language was denigrated as being subhuman and animalistic: “these signs can no more be called a language than the different movements of a dog’s tail and ears which indicate his feelings” (Baynton 53). Written as angels, outcasts, brutes, or otherwise existential and allegorical figures, deaf characters in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Western literature –​as written by non-​deaf, non-​signing, authors –​often marginalized or idealized deafness in ways that revealed cultural attitudes more than actual deaf lives. “Everywhere, even in Paris, in the most advanced civilization,” the narrator of French writer Alfred de Musset’s story, “Pierre and Camille” (1844) tells us, “deaf mutes were looked upon as a kind of being separate from the rest of humanity, stamped with the seal of the wrath of Providence” (Batson and Bergman 13). Ranging from idealized, 45

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beautiful, silent virgins [de Musset’s Camille, Wilkie Collins’s Madonna in Hide and Seek (1854), Charles Dickens’s Sophy in Doctor Marigold (1865)] to the brutish yet noble savage Gerasim in Ivan Turgenev’s short story, “MuMu” (1854), to the highly allegorical treatment of deafness in “Talking Horse,” written by Bernard Malamud (1973), to the extreme naivete of Eudora Welty’s deaf couple who have missed their train in “The Key” (1941), canonical and popular Western literature contains a fair number of representations of deafness. As with disability, once one starts looking, disability –​and by extension here, deafness –​is more present and prevalent than one would assume (Garland-​Thomson para. 7).Yet often, these portrayals of deafness are highly symbolic, stylized, idealized, or dehumanizing. In these works of literature, when juxtaposed with hearing and speaking protagonists and characters, deaf and signing people often are shown to be deficient, or lacking, in comparison. Such a persistent portrayal is an indication of what is known as audism, or the “hearing way of dominating, restructuring, and exercising authority over the deaf community…[in ways that also involve] the historical pathologization of the deaf body and the normalizing practices of institutions designed to ‘help restore the deaf to humanity’ ” (qtd. in Bauman, “Listening”). For Deaf writers and poets, writing became a strategy to assert the importance of signed languages while also acknowledging and countering assumptions about what deaf writers and poets could or couldn’t do in comparison with their hearing peers. Early attempts at creative, literary works generally took the form of conventional verse poetry or nonfiction autobiographical pieces. Nineteenth-​century deaf poets, keenly aware of the cultural link between orality and poetry, especially in relation to formal features such as rhyme and meter, tried to acknowledge cultural beliefs about the primacy of sound for poetry while also writing in ways that demonstrated their desire to “sever hearing ability from poetic ability” (Esmail, “Perchance My Hand May Touch the Lyre” 509). With the exception of Deaf writer John Burnet’s short story, “The Orphan Mute” (1835), most early deaf creative writers who published their work were concerned with political purposes or with readership and their choice of the nonfiction and poetic genres reflected that. As Christopher Krentz puts it, the “written word” had a complicated role for these early deaf Americans; “[w]‌r iting served as a bridge between deaf and hearing people, giving deaf Americans a means to demonstrate their reason and humanity to the hearing majority” (A Mighty Change xii). Compelled to defend deaf writers and poets, Gallaudet College president Edward Miner Gallaudet, son of one of the two co-​founders of the American School for the Deaf (1817), Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, wrote in Harper’s in 1884 that “[i]‌t is no easy matter, if indeed it be at all possible, for those of us who possess the sense of hearing to place ourselves in the position of those who dwell for a lifetime in a world of silence…And yet the interesting fact appears that the deaf, in no inconsiderable numbers, have essayed to mount on the wing of poetic expression” (87). This assumption about Deaf writers and poets as forever aspirational but doomed to fail because of the overweening auditory nature of poetry continues on into the contemporary era; in 2009, DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark wrote that “[t]he Deaf poet is no oxymoron, but one might think so, given the popular understanding that poetry has sound and voice at its heart” (1). Clark, like other Deaf poets, relies on other central aspects of poetry: sense details, imagery, and rhythm, an aspect of language that crosses modality; rhythm can be written, spoken, signed. Conventional thinking about the auditory requirements of literary writing was not limited to poetry; Edna Edith Sayers argues that the dearth of deaf characters and writers is a function of how literature works: stories are told or narrated through spoken and heard dialogue (1).This phonocentric underpinning of English literature, in conjunction with the stigma surrounding disability in general and deafness in particular, meant that deafness in literature tended to follow 46

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along fairly similar narrative trajectories. As written by hearing, non-​signing authors, historically, deafness was usually the appearance of an anomaly, with deafened ears and a (typically) “silenced” tongue as stigmatized sites of difference and knowledge production, however sympathetically portrayed. Wilkie Collins’s portrayal of the deaf and non-​speaking heroine, Madonna, in Hide and Seek (1854), is a fair exemplar of this sort of characterization: “[t]‌he keenest observers, beholding [the young deaf woman, Madonna] as she at present appears, would detect nothing in her face or figure, her manner or her costume, in the slightest degree suggestive of impenetrable mystery, or incurable misfortunate. And yet, she happens to the be the only person in Mr. Blyth’s household…whose ‘case’ is always compassionately designated as ‘a sad one’ ” (48). If “hearingness” is the assumed nature of a written work, then the mere presence of deafness and disability is often a disrupting moment in the narrative that then must be addressed, or as a problem to be solved; as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder note, “disability serves as an interruptive force that confronts cultural truisms…disability acts as a metaphor and fleshly example of the body’s unruly resistance to the cultural desire to ‘enforce normalcy’ ” (48). The predominant concern here with these historical pieces is with the answer to the repeated, implied, ideological question: What are you if you can’t hear? Can you even exist as a fully human being in this, the heard world? These questions abounded despite the insistence by Deaf people themselves that they flourished with sign language. Well-​regarded Deaf journalist, poet, and writer Laura Redden Searing (who often published under her pseudonym, Howard Glydon) wrote, in 1858, that “[s]igns are the natural language of the mute. Writing may be used in his intercourse with others, but when conversing with those who are, like himself…you will always find that he prefers signs to every other mode of intercourse” (Krentz, A Mighty Change xxiii). Even though so many early representations of deaf people and of sign language were dehumanizing and limiting, bilingual Deaf people wanted to read, and thereby see, themselves in English literature. In 1848, American deaf education publications reviewed the few available works by deaf authors and poets writing in English (Burnet 179;“Poetry” 14–​15). Later, in 1893, 1894, and 1916, discussions of “the deaf in literature,” as published by both deaf and hearing authors, appeared in American Deaf publications (I.V.J., “The Deaf in Literature” 3; “The Deaf in Literature” 79–​80;Terry 53–​55). As noteworthy and rare sightings, these appearances, in print, of deaf characters were largely celebrated by readers and writers in Deaf community periodicals (known as “the silent press” or “the Little Paper Family”) except when hearing authors gave deaf characters subhuman, superhuman, or otherworldly qualities. “In all these stories and poems [by hearing authors],” writes reviewer I.V.J., in The Silent Worker in 1893, “there is a halo of sympathy thrown around them –​no mute ever appears as a villain” (3). Later, the same reviewer, I.V.J., wrote in 1899 that “[s]‌uch well known [hearing] writers as Sir Walter Scott, [Charles] Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Hall Caine, Mrs. E. S. Phelps Ward, and a few others, have introduced [‘deaf-​mute1 heroes and heroines’] into their stories or novels, but while picturing them with tenderness, and pathos, there has always been something lacking; we will call it local color for want of a better phrase” (105). The lack of “local color” –​or nuance, complexity, and multidimensionality of deaf characters, language, community, and context is an old problem in literature. Concerned about the power of false ideas about deafness and Deaf people in literature, in 1916, Deaf writer and poet Howard L. Terry reported to the National Association of the Deaf that “there will always be something for this [literary] bureau to look after” and that letters to protest egregious representations of deaf people in print had been written to all the “leading magazines” and to famous writers of that era (54). In response, he reports, replies from writers Jack London and Mary Roberts Rinehart (the “American Agatha Christie”) have “invariably been…that the deaf themselves should write about the deaf ” (54). Easier said than done, as 47

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Terry, and contemporary writer and poet John Lee Clark, noted, in relation to the difficulties of publishing (Clark xiv). Little wonder, then, that so many Deaf readers and writers –​then and now –​say that English literature doesn’t feel like us.

Phonocentric norms and the disconstruction of sign language However, audition does not always have to be the norm even for “hearing” people, and a historical illustration of a national social shift toward audition is revealing of this often unconscious phonocentric bias for English readers and writers. In the 1930s, American Deaf painter, writer, and silent film actor Albert Ballin argued that the arrival of sound film, or “Talkies,” would be short-​lived after sound-​enthralled viewers realized that spoken dialogue slowed down the pace of a film; hearing people would soon tire, he predicted, of the “incessant clatter” (76). Prior to that time, both hearing and deaf people had flocked to the theaters for “silent films”; in addition to the use of short and readable subtitles, reliance on gesture, pantomime, and telling facial expressions made this medium appealing. Ballin wrote that watching a good silent film lingered in the memory like a good book:  it did not “scream” (76). Similarly, Rebecca Sanchez has argued, silent films, and one in particular, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), “associated the fetishization of verbal speech within the context of fascist propaganda with the film industry’s movement from silent to spoken dialogue pictures…at the center of the film is a consideration of the implications of the assumption of verbal language’s superiority as a means of expression” (155–​156). Extrapolating from and extending Jacques Derrida’s work on phonocentrism, Deaf Studies scholar H.-​Dirksen Bauman argues that the crucial and arbitrary alignment of voice and being or power has led to a “ ‘disconstruction of [sign] language,’ in which the category has been formed within a fundamental lack of awareness of the full human potential for language” (“Listening”). Bauman writes, “signed languages are not aberrations, nor mere supplements to speech; they take the form of one human language modality among others, equal to speech. In short, to sign is human” (emphasis in original) (“On the Disconstruction” 127–​128). The situation for Deaf writers shifted in the 1960s, with the rather late “discovery” by a hearing linguist that American Sign Language was indeed a full-​fledged human language and not just “the signs,” or a manually coded system; “deaf people began organizing as a social movement, challenging the idea that they were impaired and defining themselves increasingly as a linguistic minority, using the model of ethnicity” (Shakespeare and Watson 548). Even so, the linking of audition and voice with power and being meant that even before pen hit paper, Deaf creative arts in English were already laden with the baggage of over 130 years of resolutions, proclamations, and recommendations. In 1880, educators of the deaf converged in Milan to review and discuss methods of instruction; attendees argued about which was a more effective method of instruction and learning: speech alone or “manualism,” or sign language. At this conference, the following resolution was adopted, a resolution that reverberates even to this day: “The Convention, considering the incontestable superiority of speech over signs, (1) for restoring deaf-​mutes to social life, (2) for giving them greater facility of language, declares that the method of articulation should have the preference over that of signs in the instruction and education of the deaf and dumb” (qtd. in Gallaudet, “The Milan Convention” 5–​6). Shortly after, in 1884, Alexander Graham Bell wrote in Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race, that “deaf-​mutes think in the gesture language, and English is apt to remain a foreign tongue. They can communicate with hearing persons by writing, but they often write in broken English, as a foreigner would speak. They think in gestures, and often translate into written English with the idioms of the sign language” (42). Bell wrote this “memoir” 48

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to discourage intermarriage between Deaf individuals even though the great majority (over 90 percent) are born to hearing parents, not deaf parents. Then much later, after the passage of the Public Law 94–​142, also known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, in 1975, many deaf and hard of hearing children who would have otherwise attended residential or day programs for the deaf, where –​by and large –​sign language was used for instruction and socialization, ended up going to “mainstreaming” schools where spoken language was the norm.

Breaking English: reclaiming and remaking literature Despite the fact that Deaf writers are necessarily bilingual and demonstrate many characteristics of bilinguals in their writing for different purposes, Deaf writing was then and is still sometimes described as broken English. Deaf novelist Douglas Bullard, believed to be the first writer of a “Deaf culture” novel, Islay (1986), wrote, “Us deaf communicate by the eye of course, and this creates a thought process wildly different than that processed by the ear. What looks right to the ear does not necessarily look right to the eye. Many deaf people process language along the lines of ASL, and when they write, the syntax reflects this thought process” (“Deaf English” 12). Resisting this characterization, some contemporary Deaf creative writers are experimenting with textual, linguistic, syntactic, and rhetorical strategies as a way of conveying and writing a Deaf life; “Deaf English,” in turn, becomes an innovative and creative interrogation of both English and English literature. Cynthia Peters calls Bullard’s Islay the first book-​length piece of creative writing to focus on Deaf culture and bilingualism (122). In this novel, an episodic tale of an attempt to establish a separatist Deaf state, Bullard presents a glossed version of ASL that is not quite ASL, nor is it English. Bullard initially begins with code-​switching between Standard English and ASL glossing, and slowly moves toward more use of ASL gloss and “TTY talk” as the reader learns how to “read” the new form. TTY “talk” is the patois that emerged for users of teletypewriters. In doing so, Bullard outlines a new possible reality in print. Lyson Sulla, the Deaf protagonist, has a dream of a Deaf state within the Union. He tells his wife, You know that Laurent Clerc [a real-​life French Deaf teacher who traveled to America with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to establish America’s first school for the deaf in 1817] had same dream! Himself greatest deaf in history, started Golden Age for deaf there, France. Then brought sign here America; almost started Golden Age for us deaf, but hearing oralism frustrated him, broke up deaf cooperation and almost destroyed Sign Language.That why Clerc liked idea for deaf gathering into one state where deaf itself normal! (Bullard, Islay 6–​7; italics in original) Tellingly, as part of the back story, two competing histories of the island, Islay, are presented.The first is its national (American) history as “an unwanted orphan shifted back and forth across the River American, its parentage and legitimacy denied” until a Civil War veteran claimed it for the Union (Bullard, Islay 5). The strategy of inserting “contesting narratives,” a “re-​writing” of history, is an important part of the process of discursive resistance (Ashcroft 102). Islay has been feted as the “first ASL novel,” and one that plays “the conventions of mainstream literature off those [of] vernacular ASL storytelling” (Peters 140). Through Bullard’s text a distinctly bilingual Deaf literature becomes possible. While Bullard’s Islay follows the structural conventions of the novel, genre doesn’t always translate in the intersection between English and ASL; sign language “face-​to-​face” literatures contain many genres that don’t readily show up in English, such as number stories, ABC stories, 49

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“visual vernacular” or VV storytelling, and so on. And visual vernacular is already itself a hybrid form, combining poetry and narrative techniques with heavy use of depiction and classifiers. To speak or use a certain language “means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (Fanon 17–​18). In such a setting, the notion of a “Deaf literature” in English is interestingly complicated. In addition to what is already noted here about hearing status, language use, and Deaf identity, do conventions of English literary craft matter in the same way? After all, notions of what constitutes “literary,” “art,” and “universal” are constructed values, embedded within a particular ideological culture. Can other kinds of less overtly “literary” expressions of Deaf worldviews and experiences qualify, such as personal narratives, a predominant and necessary genre in many Deaf publications? What about those stories or poems that are transliterated exactly as signed? Are these literary? Who are these being written for? About who? By whom?

Vexing the print page The Deaf writer’s relationship with the printed page has always been vexed. Deaf writer and journalist Tom Willard, in a satirical nonfiction piece from 1993, “How to Write Like a Hearing Reporter,” skewers common and stereotyped portrayals of Deaf people in print media. In an observation of how “hearing reporters write about deaf people,” Willard proposes this set of discursive co-​constructions based on his reading history in English: Let’s start with the headline. There are two words that must appear in every headline. One is “silence” (or “silent”). For example: Sounds of Silence Silent Courage The Silent World of Joe Jordan The other word is “signs”: Signs of Confusion A Good Sign Theater Signs If you want to go all the way, you can combine the two: Signs of Silence. (Harmon and Nelson 38; boldface in original) “Another tip,”Willard writes, “when writing about deaf people, it is permissible to refer to them by their first name throughout the article, as if they were children. One last tip…Don’t [write about deaf people] often. Your community may be filled with interesting deaf people doing newsworthy things, but who cares? Once a year is enough” (Harmon and Nelson 39). Deaf poet and writer Abiola Haroun’s 2012 alliterative shape poem, “DEAF-​ INISM,” also suggests that readings of deafness are already overdetermined, even overwrought with pathologized, phonocentric, narratives: Open dictionary: Dumb         Disabled Destitute         Deprived Dunce 50

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Say what? Flip page:                 Docile                         Dependent                 Dysfunctional                         Dull                 Dweeb Close Dictionary. Perform self-​check. Ha! (Harmon and Nelson 132) Haroun’s rereading of the connotations surrounding the word “deaf,” and assertion of independence from these, quite literally reverses the reading process; if the separation of the “deaf synonyms” on the page are meant to resemble the pages of a book, then the reader is made to read backwards. The back of the page is read before the front of the page. Deaf writing –​and reading –​is never simply just that; production and reception is intimately tied up with the politics of language, cultural capital, and identity. Little wonder, then, that over time, Deaf writers like Bullard began to see Standard English and the conventions of written literature as being less than satisfactory for their purposes. Skilled Deaf writers often find themselves patronized and the target of exceptionalism. Even now, when a Deaf person writes, with ease and flair in English, she or he is conscious of the fact that the writing itself will garner attention largely or partially based upon the writer’s hearing status. As Deaf writer and blogger Allison Polk wrote in a humorous piece advocating against the overuse of videophones, “But you know what? I’m a freakin’ good typist. Me know spelling and big words and how to use commas, yes, me good. So to hell with it” (“Top 5 Reasons to Hate Vping” para. 5). A literal reading of Polk’s commentary might consider this an intentional use of “bad English” in a reflection of the alternately disarming and forthright quality of contemporary bloggers. Others would consider this an innovative use of transliteration and an interesting comment upon the politics of English use when a visual alternative is available. Another possible interpretation is that it is simply a funny and Deaf-​centered observation on the social awkwardness that the technology of constant visual contact –​always being “on” and visible –​entails. Still others would question or at least consider Polk’s deliberate decision to write contact or pidgin English when she is clearly highly skilled in written English. When a bilingual Deaf writer produces a text in English that requires cultural and linguistic knowledge from a different language, this presents the outlines of a possible and radical counter-​discursive “theory” of a particularly Deaf, and bilingual, literature.

Theory and praxis of writing ASL in English literature How might American Sign Language infuse English literature? As a reflection of the lived experiences of bilinguals or multilinguals, Deaf literature in English often comes up against the limits of translation and challenges with encoding of signs on the page. Some Deaf writers have argued that writing should feel as smooth as possible to the reader of English, regardless of hearing and language status. Some Deaf readers have also noted that the need to explain or “translate” back and forth while reading can be distracting (Harmon, “Writing Deaf ” 205). In the latter case, is it possible in a theory of Deaf literature to have writing that simply swaps out hearing characters with Deaf lives as the defining characteristic, presented through writing that 51

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is otherwise indistinguishable from writing by hearing authors, even complete with spoken language dialogue tags? A conventionalized presentation does have the effect of “normalizing” Deaf characters (though the norm is still potentially still a phonocentric one). Readers are not jarred into a recognition that these characters are DEAF and that they use a different language; writers of these kinds of pieces argue that these are simply human lives, and the reading of these lives should be as smoothly presented as possible; the reader (presumed hearing) is invited gently into these worlds and so becomes intimately involved in ways that might not be possible in the pieces that insist upon separatism, or at the very least, an assertion of independence. These and other questions go to the heart of what it means to write English while deaf. ASL includes fingerspelling, a 1:1 manual representation of each letter in the English language alphabet, and fingerspelling is, in fact, some of the few fully borrowed features from English text in ASL. However, the situation is different with signs and sign phrases. In English, quotations of signs are always less than translated; there really is no satisfactory way to translate, transcribe, or even transliterate fluent sign language –​a visual, kinesthetic/​ tactile, depictive, highly compressed, and spatial language –​into a linear coding system based upon spoken languages and audition. Even the use of English glosses on sign language, such as DEAF-​WORLD, necessarily removes grammatical and depictive elements shown in the face, hands, and body. There is currently a movement toward Sign Writing, or a separate writing system, si5s, but as with written English, sign writers and readers need to know the language being transliterated into visual, textual, symbols. As of now, the numbers of “sign writers” and si5s writers is small and still does not yet manage to convey the richness of sign language. On her thoughts about writing, Deaf writer and English teacher Sara Stallard uses a loose English gloss, or translation, to convey her ideas: Know how when chat with other writers deaf same me, discuss how put down way of communicating, like “she said” or “she signed.” Feel awkward to put ASL in English frame. Both language very different. Translate ASL in English always hard, take ASL hand, squeeze, drip out left only idea, finish, idea fluff into English, end up lose active expression its ASL. (220) Deaf writers use a variety of typographical, syntactic, and other techniques to convey the inseparability of Deaf identity, life, and language. The result is to make Deaf lit. feel strange or foreign for a hearing reader used to audition-​oriented norms, but “home” for a Deaf reader. Deaf English is shaped by its interactions with the “hearing line” and with Standard English, as written and spoken. Taken as a whole, contemporary Deaf writers are experimenting with a number of syntactic devices to better convey the seamlessness of ASL in a Deaf life. Many dispense with quotation marks altogether, preferring instead to present ASL as a non-​spoken language by means of aligning closer to thought through the use of italics, dashes to set off each line of ASL dialogue, the use of lowercase and other stylistic, typographical, or punctuation features. Writers like Allison Polk intentionally use both code-​switching and typographical features to emphasize ASL, as dialogue in an otherwise narrated scenario, in English, but the fact of Deaf lives is never explained or addressed; they simply are. In “Dandelion” (2012), Polk’s protagonist talks with her child, also Deaf: “WRONG-​WRONG? SAD YOU?” (294). Code-​switching, or the alternation of two different languages, is a common feature in contemporary fiction by bilingual or multicultural hearing writers. 52

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English language glosses from ASL is another common strategy. Poet, writer, and publisher Raymond Luczak’s “Poster Child” (2012) is told solely as a vernacular transcription through gloss for both sign and fingerspelling, and the glossing of ASL reinforces the theme of this flash fiction in dialogue form: Me-​accused kidnapping? What-​for-​for?… All-​r ight, all-​r ight. Me-​tell-​you explain again two-​days-​ago. Me-​work principal office same-​same when someone-​walk-​up-​to-​me girl short-​cute-​cute, age six, maybe eight. Saw her around before, but name blank-​mind that time. No one in office, just-​ the-​two-​of-​us. R-​e-​c-​e-​s-​s time, you-​know? Ask-​her, “Help  need?” Ask-​me, “Need kid you-​need?” “Have kids finish. Why?” “Mom-​Dad don’t-​want.” Mind-​blocked. Girl herself young. “Unh –​  why?” “Me-​sit home watch open-​lips-​like-​clown-​stupid at me, me wish in school already.” “Sorry. Maybe parents learn signs will.” “They-​don’t-​care.” “Dorm supervisor who?” “Doris-​Davies.” “Discuss two-​of-​us will, figure-​out do-​do. Go play.” Her-​gone, mind-​blocked still. Couldn’t focus work. Give-​up, search Doris-​Davies, not there, came back office, continue working. Mind-​obsessed girl still, but continued working. Found Doris-​Davies dorm; found her upset. Girl disappeared-​from-​surface. Everyone looked-​looked. That all information me-​have girl. Me-​take her? Silly you. Of-​course not. Afford take-​care kids can’t. W-​h-​a-​t? Me-​take her not. Understand? My house? No way. Go-​there can’t. My house, not yours. That poster up-​there smart. Pretty. Awful, awful gone. Wish instant adopt could. Then safe for sure.You-​know? (95) Only through ASL is the Deaf child recognized, owned, brought up from below the “surface.” Here, the use of ASL is inseparable from the plight of the missing, overlooked child. The horror of this story is only possible in ASL: parents who can’t be bothered to learn how to communicate with their deaf child, effectively disowned and never safe. Other Deaf writers and poets incorporate ASL sign gloss, but use these in such a way as to reveal a Deaf sensibility rather than focusing on the jarring quality of such direct, and yet still limited, transliterations. Deaf writer and blogger Joseph Santini, for example, uses sign gloss in an innovative way in his short story, “Lytopedia” (2012), a tale with post-​apocalyptic overtones, about persecution of ASL users and Deaf families. All ASL dialogue is conveyed in italics, with commas punctuating phrases; name signs are glossed, in lowercase, with no spacing between the words. In this story, the protagonist describes her sleeping mother and sister, resting in the aftermath of a chase: “handovermouth and brushedcheek curled cat-​like near the meeting roots of a red-​barked tree” (Santini 265). This use of italics and near-​English glossing has the effect of bringing the narration closer to the protagonist’s thoughts. Interlanguage, a common term in the teaching of English as a second language, provides a productive perspective on Deaf writing; fusing together linguistic elements or structures of two 53

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languages can be read as a sign that the writer is making an English as a Second Language “error” in the text, but some writers use these seemingly ESL issues as a way to convey both “voice” and character. In “Holding Up” (2012), Deaf writer Pamela Wright incorporates both ASL glossing, though mostly translated, some ASL syntax, and “TTY talk” (TTY is an abbreviation for “text telephone for the deaf,” a common mode of long-​distance communication well before text messaging and pagers). In one such conversation with the young protagonist, who is pregnant and unsure if she should keep the baby, Wright uses interlanguage for her interlocutor in order to convey his writerly “voice” and his perspective on her situation and what she “should do”: “I saw you over lynns house you look mad you go home drive past me you not say hi to me that is ok i not mad at you lynn told me sara talk about rumor with jim v and billy i know you nice girl i not believe jim v and billy they make up story i get so mad!!!!!!” (178). Anyone who has ever sent a text message will be intimately familiar with some of the conventions of spelling and capitalization in “TTY talk,” but some of the syntax echoes ASL syntax. “Syntactic fusion” is closer to what is happening with the ASL dialogue in Wright’s “Holding Up”: the protagonist tells her friend about her embarrassment, and her friend replies, “ ‘So! So! Give them talk! Let them give your name shine! Baby will come!’ Her eyes shone with glee. ‘Baby will beautiful!’ ” (Wright 175). Here, syntactic fusion gives the reader a sense of the vernacular being used. By inserting using ASL glosses, code-​switching, vernacular transcriptions, and syntactic fusion, these writers are opening up a gap between the Deaf writer and the presumed hearing reader.This gap is important for recognizing and subverting the phonocentric norms of literature and writing. Deaf writers are also “re-​writing” canonical works, and in doing so, are “talking back” to the ideological constructs that frame or exclude differences of various kinds. Both playwright Gilbert Eastman and ASL performance artist Rosa Lee Timm have chosen George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (1913) as the object of their protest against the utter “Englishness” of this piece. “Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts” is one of George Bernard Shaw’s most popular plays; it is the story of two upper-​crust bachelor linguists who decide to take on a penniless young woman who speaks with what they see as a “dreadful” Cockney accent.They train her in proper speech and manners, and after some time, she is able to “pass” for upper class. In Gilbert Eastman’s retelling, the play “Sign Me Alice,” the “experimental” and implied brutality of such an exercise are emphasized. Alice, the protagonist, is fluent in ASL, and Dr. Zeno, the stand-​in for the Henry Higgins character, trains her in “U.S.E.” or “Using Signed English,” a satirical riff on Signing Exact English. Alice, at the pivotal moment, realizes, “In my heart, Sign real mine… Yes, I  sign English to you, but I  feel more comfortable with my Sign. Nothing can change me…U.S.E. has nothing to do with being a lady. A lady can use sign” (88–​89). Timm presents her re-​writing through a humorous lens in a comedic performance; in “My Deaf Lady,” her Henry Higgins is fully fluent in ASL and is shocked and appalled by his protégé’s unclear and stumbling use of Signed English, complete with initialized signs. After a humorous time-​lapse of their training, the Henry Higgins figure asks the Eliza Doolittle stand-​in, “But just try to imagine yourself a fluent ASL user. Imagine being able to express all of your thoughts in a beautiful language with signs for which there is no ASL equivalent” (Timm). Such re-​writing is a particularly powerful act, for only by seizing the text and inserting oneself into the hegemonic narrative can one deconstruct binaries concerning power, language, place, and culture.To write and read the lives of bilingual Deaf people on the printed page is an act of translation, of embodied literacies in motion: always shifting, conditional, and negotiated. By attending to how language is conveyed  –​and the ways that norms, conventions, and expectations restrict possibilities –​writers and readers, regardless of hearing status, can take a lesson from Deaf writers. Over the last 175 years, Deaf writers have written with and against the 54

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grain of Standard English; their writing reveals a range of textual and linguistic strategies, and taken as a whole, these works suggest an engagement with, a laying bare of, and a resistance to the ideology of phonocentric privileging norms.

Note 1 In nineteenth-​century publications, the term “deaf and dumb,” and then “deaf mute,” was used to describe deaf and signing non-​speakers. “Mute” has fallen out of widespread use as more Deaf people have argued that they “speak” sign language.

Works cited Ashcroft, Bill. Post-​colonial Transformation. New York: Routledge, 2001. Bahan, Benjamin. “Face-​to-​Face Tradition in the American Deaf Community: Dynamics of the Teller, the Tale, and the Audience.” In Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature. Eds. H. Dirksen Bauman, Jennifer L. Nelson, and Heidi M. Rose. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006,  21–​50. Bahan, Benjamin, Harlan Lane, and Robert Hoffmeister. A Journey into the Deaf World. San Diego, CA: DawnSign Press, 1996. Ballin, Albert. The Deaf Mute Howls. Introduction by Douglas C. Baynton. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1998. Batson,Trent, and Eugene Bergman. Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. 3rd ed. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1985. Bauman, H-​Dirksen. “Listening to Phonocentrism with Deaf Eyes: Derrida’s Mute Philosophy of (Sign) Language.” Philosophy of Disability 9.1 (2008). —​—​—​. “On the Disconstruction of (Sign) Language in the Western Tradition: A Deaf Reading of Plato’s Cratylus.” In OpenYour Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking. Ed. H-​Dirksen Bauman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 127–​145. Bauman, H-​Dirksen, and Joseph Murray. Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Humanity. St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Baynton, Douglas C. Forbidden Signs:  American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Bell, Alexander Graham. Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1884. Bullard, Douglas. Islay: A Novel. Silver Spring, MD: T.J. Publishers, 1986. —​—​—​. “Deaf English.” Clerc Scar 5.6 (2009). Online. Burnet, John R. “Education of the Deaf and Dumb in New Jersey.” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 1.3 (April 1848): 177–​181. Clark, John Lee. “Editor’s Note.” Deaf American Poetry. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2009. Collins, Wilkie. Hide and Seek. Ed. Catherine Peters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Donne, Vicki. “Deaf Characters in Literature.” In The SAGE Deaf Studies Encyclopedia. Eds. Genie Gertz and Patrick Boudrealt. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2016, 660–​663. Eastman, Gilbert. Two Deaf Plays: Sign Me Alice & Laurent Clerc: A Profile. San Diego, CA: Dawn Sign Press, 1974. Esmail, Jennifer. “‘Perchance My Hand May Touch the Lyre’:  Orality and Textuality in Nineteenth-​ Century Deaf Poetry.” Victorian Poetry 49.4 (Dec. 2011): 509–​534. —​—​—​. Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds of Victorian Literature and Culture. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin,White Masks. Transl. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Gallaudet, Edward Miner.“The Milan Convention.” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 26.1 (1881): 1–​16. —​—​—​. “Poetry of the Deaf.” Reprint of original Harper’s Magazine March 1884 in American Annals of the Deaf 29 (July 1884): 200–​222. In Education of Deaf Children: Evidence of Edward Miner Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell. Ed. Joseph C. Gordon. Washington, D.C.: Volta Bureau, 1892, 87–​93. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. “Becoming Disabled.” The New York Times, Aug. 19, 2016, Sunday Review. Online.

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Kristen Harmon Goldberg, David, Dennis Looney, and Natalia Lusin. “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2013.” Modern Language Association. Feb. 2015. https://​apps.mla.org/​pdf/​2013_​enrollment_​survey.pdf. Harmon, Kristen. “Writing Deaf:  Textualizing Deaf Literature.” Sign Language Studies 7.2 (Winter 2007): 200–​207. Harmon, Kristen, and Jennifer Nelson. Deaf American Prose:  1980–​2010. Washington, D.C.:  Gallaudet University Press, 2012. Haroun, Abiola. “DEAF-​inism.” In Deaf American Prose: 1980–​2010. Eds. Kristen Harmon and Jennifer Nelson. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2012, 132. Holcomb, Thomas K. Introduction to American Deaf Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. I.V.J. “The Deaf in Literature.” The Silent Worker 6.4 (Dec. 1893): 3. —​—​—​. “The Deaf Girl Next Door, or Marjory’s Life Work, by Helen Marion Burnside.” The Silent Worker 11.7 (1899): 105. Krentz, Christopher. A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing: 1816–​1864. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2000. —​—​—​. Writing Deafness:  The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-​ Century American Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Luczak, Raymond. “Poster Child (Told in American Sign Language Gloss).” Deaf American Prose: 1980–​ 2010. Eds. Kristen Harmon and Jennifer Nelson. Washington, D.C.:  Gallaudet University Press, 2012,  95–​97. Mazique, Rachel. Personal correspondence, Dec. 18, 2017. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Mitchell, Ross, Travas Young, Bellamie Bachleda, and Michael Karchmer. “How Many People Use ASL in the United States? Why Estimates Need Updating.” Sign Language Studies 6.3 (2006): 306–​335. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. National Institutes of Health. “Quick Statistics about Hearing.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dec. 15, 2016. www.nidcd.nih.gov/​health/​statistics/​quick-​statistics-​hearing. Peters, Cynthia. Deaf American Literature: From Carnival to the Canon.Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2000. Polk, Allison. “Top 5 Reasons to Hate vPing.” Feb. 18, 2009. Blog. https://​queenalpo.typepad.com/​. —​—​—​. “Dandelion.” Deaf American Prose:  1980–​2010. Eds. Kristen Harmon and Jennifer Nelson. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2012, 293–​300. Sanchez, Rebecca. “Rejecting the Talkies:  Charlie Chaplin’s Language Politics and the Future of Deaf Studies in the Humanities.” In Innovations in Deaf Studies:  The Role of Deaf Scholars. Eds. Annelies Kusters, Maartje DeMeulder, and Dai O’Brien. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 151–​166. Santini, Joseph. “Lytopedia.” Deaf American Prose: 1980–​2010. Eds. Kristen Harmon and Jennifer Nelson. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2012, 265–​276. Sayers, Edna Edith. Outcasts and Angels:  The New Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2012. Shakespeare, Tom, and Nick Watson. “Making the Difference:  Disability, Politics, and Recognition.” In The Handbook of Disability Studies. Eds. Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman, and Michael Bury. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001, 546–​564. Stallard, Sara. “What That ASL Dialect?” Deaf American Prose:  1980–​2010. Eds. Kristen Harmon and Jennifer Nelson. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2012, 220–​223. Terry, Howard L. “Report of the Literary Bureau.” Proceedings of the Eleventh (Special) Convention of the National Association of the Deaf. Kansas City, MO: Walkenhorst Printing Co., 1916. “The Deaf in Literature.” In American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 39 (1894): 79–​80. “The Poetry of the Deaf and Dumb.” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb. Reprint of vol. 1 (1848) in Supplement to the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 23.3 (1878): 14–​15. Timm, Rosa Lee. “My Deaf Lady.” The Rosa Lee Show. Oct. 14, 2006. Video. www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=OrDMkmYdnlQ. Willard, Tom. “How to Write Like a Hearing Reporter.” In Deaf American Prose: 1980–​2010. Eds. Kristen Harmon and Jennifer Nelson. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press 2012, 51–​52. Wright, Pamela. “Holding Up.” Deaf American Prose:  1980–​2010. Eds. Kristen Harmon and Jennifer Nelson. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2012, 171–​181.

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5 “HERE THERE BE MONSTERS” Mapping novel representations of the relationship between disability and monstrosity in recent graphic narratives and comic books Chris Foss From the Golden Age of Comic Books (with its monstrous supervillains such as the Joker and Red Skull) to our contemporary moment (in between the August 2019 publication of Marvel Monsters #1 and the 2020 release of the new animated web television series Monsters at Work), it is impossible to imagine sketching the history of English-​language comics without recourse to a comprehensive consideration of monstrosity. Monsters, of course, have maintained a ubiquitous presence within the human imagination and its literary expressions since ancient times. For some, there is a visceral thrill, even genuine fun, in the sense of danger that accompanies a potential encounter with the monstrous; for others, however, the terror usually associated with these figures and the evil they stereotypically represent is decidedly traumatic and merits horror, if not hatred. Unfortunately, there is a long-​standing disturbing history of pejorative associations of disability with monstrosity. Counternarratives have, of course, persisted all along as sites of resistance to traditional templates and their problematic couplings of monstrosity and disability, but arguably such revisionist takes have become increasingly prevalent and powerful since the last part of the twentieth century as disability rights activism and disability studies scholarship have encouraged more progressive understandings of disability, including reimagining its association with the monstrous. Given the fundamental role monsters play within the genre, comics offers plenty of fertile ground for critical assessments of any potential advances in this regard. Such a focus is especially engaging in that, as Katherine Shaeffer and Spencer Chalifour have observed, “Comics are monstrous themselves. Their very hybrid nature (text fused with image) makes them so. The discourse surrounding comics…calls our attention to their very visible seams…. Comics are a veritable Frankenstein’s monster of verbal/​visual media, and they can show us monsters in glorious detail and vibrant color.” Three recent comics texts each present an instructive range of ambiguous, disabling, but above all enabling possibilities where the nexus of disability and monstrosity is concerned: the highly praised comics collections Monstress [Volumes One and Two] by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (2016–​17), the much ballyhooed debut graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters [Book One] by Emil Ferris (2017), and the unheralded four-​page Monster Girl comic by Helene Fischer (2017). These texts offer an illuminating starting point for the further exploration of the metaphorical assumptions about disability and monstrosity with which they engage, all the

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while reaffirming the crucial role of the genre’s own hybridity in foregrounding such considerations. That is, the location of the monstrous body in this particular textual format offers a range of diverse possibilities for both reinforcing and exploding the normative borders that have been constructed to define what is monstrous as dangerous/​deformed/​diseased. What is more, these texts encourage an intersectional approach to how multiple other facets of the monstrous (such as class-​based/​socioeconomic, ethnic/​racial, and gendered/​sexual aspects) overlap with disabled monstrosity and together blur, cross, deconstruct, and/​or erase numerous lines along their various borders around the human. As Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson has asserted, “figures of hybridity and excess such as monsters, grotesques, and cyborgs” often are presented so as “to suggest their transgressive potential” (“Integrating” 338), but for her one must insistently acknowledge their tendency to “eras[e]‌real disabled bodies from the history of these terms compromises the very critique they intend to launch and misses an opportunity to use disability as a feminist critical category” (“Integrating” 338). Indeed, as Tobin Siebers cautions, “It is easy to mythologize disability as an advantage. Disabled bodies are so unusual and bend the rules of representation to such extremes that they must mean something extraordinary” (“Disability in Theory” 744–​45). For Siebers, “the political struggle of people with disabilities…requires a realistic conception of the disabled body” that “resist[s] the temptation to describe the disabled body as either power laden or as a weapon of resistance” (“Disability in Theory” 745). Representations of monster-​human hybrids in comics may hardly be expected to offer the sort of realism Garland-​Thomson and Siebers privilege, and the genre itself has also been prone to promulgating the supercrip.Yet, in the three texts at issue here, only Monstress actually features a depiction of its protagonist’s disabled body “as either power laden or as a weapon of resistance” –​and her complicated case merits considerable qualification, if not full reevaluation of the applicability of the label, following Sami Schalk’s critical interrogation of stereotypical conceptions of the supercrip. All three “raced and gendered” (Garland-​Thomson, “Integrating” 337)  protagonists are more aligned with freaks like Saartje Bartmann’s Hottentot Venus persona than they are with supercrips such as Barbara Gordon’s Oracle persona, and a large part of their truly transgressive potential is embodied in their not merely monstrous but diverse bodies. According to Leonard Cassuto, freaks “straddle the unstable boundary of the socially delimited property marked ‘human’ –​and as such, freaks physically threaten…the integrity of that boundary” (87). For Garland-​Thomson, the liminal and/​or hybrid figure of the freak is fundamentally intersectional in its construction, and as such needs to be considered alongside “figures like the mulatto, the primitive, the queer, and the lady” (Extraordinary 5). In the case of Julia Pastrana, for example, “race, gender, disability, and sexuality augmented one another… to produce a spectacle of embodied otherness…” (Garland-​ Thomson, “Integrating” 338). Intersectionality –​“the idea that analyses of social oppression take account of overlapping identities based on race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability” (Siebers, “Disability and the Theory” 291)  –​suffuses so much of the most cutting-​edge work in disability studies over the past decade:  Nirmala Erevelles’s Disability and Difference in Global Contexts (2011); Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013); Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow’s Sex and Disability (2015); David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s The Biopolitics of Disability (2015); Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim (2017); and so on. It is an absolutely essential element of contemporary disability studies in general and to this crip reading in particular, which aims (following Kafer) “to address how disability is figured in and through…other categories of difference” such as “gender, race, class, and sexuality” (17). Kafer’s intersectional tour de force seeks “to carve out a place on the theoretical/​political map where feminist/​queer/​crip can feed and inform each other,” with the hope that “this imagining [will] generate more such imaginings, such that the nodes on the map 58

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and the map itself multiply, proliferate, regenerate,” as there is “need” for “multiple iterations of crip theory” (18). This chapter, in its mapping these three novel representations of the relationship between disability and monstrosity in recent graphic narratives and comic books, charts a course for one of these new nodes while encouraging rather than eschewing a befittingly monstrous proliferation of even more (re)generative intersectional crip aesthetics. Liu and Takeda’s Monstress is a complex representation of monstrous disability, a thoroughly intersectional version involving both body and mind. Liu’s complicated love for her disabled hero and Takeda’s gorgeous illustrations invoking Art Deco and gekiga aesthetics draw readers in through a sympathetic appeal rather than an objectionable othering, even as Liu’s lack of a self-​consciously progressive employment of disability still allows stereotypes to persist. From the very first scene, Liu positions her readers to reject others’ pejorative attitudes toward her protagonist’s difference. Maika Halfwolf, naked and in chains, is about to be auctioned off into some sort of personal slavery. Though the 17-​year-​old has a “fully human appearance” (1.5), she is an Arcanic  –​a halfbreed race in this fantasy world setting born of intermixing between humans and Ancients (anthropomorphic animal beings whose magical powers led to their almost god-​like supremacy long ago).1 Halfwolf ’s contemporary world is a divided one, currently in a period of uneasy stalemate after a devastating war between the human Federation and various Arcanic powers, and her purposeful entrance into Federation territory has led to her captivity. Her halfbreed status in and of itself colors how the human buyers see her, her “wild beauty” (1.6), as the seller describes it, notwithstanding. On the way to delivering her to her new owner, this seller, speaking with undisguised disgust, tells Maika, “You are a slave, an animal piece of shit on the wrong side of the wall. If there weren’t a stalemate in the war, there wouldn’t even be a wall and all of you inhuman freaks would be in chains” (1.10). Halfwolf ’s positioning as a mixed-​race freak represents a construction of difference that may be glossed as a marker of disabled identity. Given the aforementioned inextricable connection between freakery and disability –​a connection that historically has relied upon the interrelated concerns of ableism, ethnocentrism, and racism  –​Maika’s stigmatized racial difference as an Arcanic opens up some generative possibilities for intersectional articulation with representations of disability. Significantly, however, the buyers’ reaction to her difference is not only attuned to her race; it is also influenced by the brand of an eye-​like symbol in the middle of her chest and by her left arm –​or, rather, her stump, with its missing forearm and hand. One of the buyers pipes up, “And her missing arm? That brand?…she’s deformed” (1.6). Intriguingly, the seller replies, “Yes, it’s unsightly. Not that most of you have all your limbs. The war took its toll on both sides” (1.6). She insinuates Halfwolf ’s “missing arm” is not only “unsightly” but unnatural, yet at the same time she normalizes it by implying the rest of the room bears their own fair share of battle scars. Still, these physical characteristics mark Maika’s difference as disgusting deformity, which when combined with her ‘halfbreed’ status, cements her association with monstrosity. The missing arm, in particular, is central to both Halfwolf ’s person and her story. As the rest of the series develops, it is in fact this arm that predominantly signifies Maika’s status as a monstrous body, and even as it is a mysterious source of power, the seemingly uncontainable violence associated with this power (a violence Halfwolf not only is unable to control but further is subject to herself) ensures Liu’s representation does not fall prey to the many problematic aspects of the supercrip stereotype. Whether passed on down from an ancestor’s blood, somehow engineered by her mother, or through a combination of those two, Maika has a monstrum living inside of her, and this monstrum is an increasingly conscious and active presence within her. The monstra are viewed as the stuff of legend, ravenous Old Gods bent on consuming all of the known world; the lore of the Ancients told of a war predating human and Arcanic memory in which they destroyed and/​or exiled all of the monstra to a nebulous 59

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dimension called the Shadow Plains. One of Halfwolf ’s ancestors, the Shaman Empress, the most powerful Arcanic ever, was rumored to have discovered how to release exiled monstra in an attempt to harness their power by somehow incorporating one of them into her own body. It is this very same monstrum that, unknown to all, now resides with Maika, and it is from out of her stump that the monstrum manifests itself in bodily form and wreaks havoc. Takeda reworks the traditional trappings of the Japanese monsters known as kaiju by deciding to incorporate Maika’s monstrum as a part of her rather than a separate physical entity (Liu, “Action”). This is a crucial feature of the text’s representation of disability. It allows Halfwolf ’s relationship to her monstrum to be staged not (merely) as a conflict between self and other, but potentially much more powerfully as an inner dialogue within (if not with) herself. Liu thereby simultaneously invokes both visible and invisible disability, which invites readers to interrogate stale assumptions about disability born out of a variety of interrelated binaries such as self/​other, inner/​outer, and human/​monster. At the same time, the notion that Halfwolf ’s monstrosity is better understood as an inner conflict appears only tenuously supported, especially as she is only beginning to approximate what the monstrum’s presence within her might mean. After all, as her own surname constantly reminds readers, hybridity does not necessarily mean that binaries are collapsed between two distinct, if intermixed, halves. Surely for most if not all readers, at least at this stage, the two seem more like distinct biological organisms bound together through a symbiotic relationship. There is some suggestion that this particular monstrum actually is responsible for the stalemate between human and Arcanic, the source of the still unexplained annihilation of all but a small handful of those present at the last major battle (one of whom was the 14-​year-​old Maika). Now that it is waking again, it does save her at crucial moments by destroying those threatening her, but it also attempts to more randomly assert itself in order to appease its voracious appetite through brutal killings. Any supercrip tendencies aside, Liu’s apparent uncritical linkage between disability, monstrosity, and violence is disconcerting, on multiple levels. If Halfwolf ’s mixed-​race status plays a key role in problematizing any facile or final cordoning off of such dangerous monstrosity, the hybridity of the comics genre works in conjunction with this by reinforcing the fundamentally intersectional aspects to her complex, multifarious identity. Takeda needs no words to convey Maika’s mixture of confusion, fear, and surprise as she witnesses the monstrum beginning to emerge from her stump (1.94).The uncertain relationship between the two is further foregrounded specifically through the combination of image and text, such as the scene shortly after the above emergence when the monstrum pulls itself back into her arm (1.100). Halfwolf is clearly awake and aware, but her lack of control is conveyed through her silence, as the only speech bubbles on the page belong to the monstrum. At least initially, Maika hates both its presence within her and the notion that its presence suggests she is a monstress herself. She frequently threatens the monstrum, questioning what it is doing inside of her, telling it to get out of her, and announcing she will cut it out of her if she has to do so. She adamantly insists, “I’m not a monster” (1.69). Yet at various points readers are instead very much encouraged to see the two as both psychically linked and physically conjoined. For instance, as Takeda’s illustrations visually clarify, Maika’s brand, with its eye, actually is a visible sign of her link to the monstrum, as one specific splash page in particular suggests –​with the eye of the monstrum appearing above Halfwolf ’s head, her hair and its fur/​feathers/​tentacles completely intertwined and in places completely indistinguishable, so that it is difficult to say where the one body ends and the other begins (1.63). Or, perhaps even more dramatically, in the panel from the same scene in which Maika tells herself she is not a monster, readers are confronted with a close-​up of Halfwolf ’s eye staring at them, the rest of her face otherwise completely covered by her disheveled hair. Not only is 60

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the image strikingly reminiscent of the monstrum’s eye and tentacles, but the only words in the panel are a monstrum thought bubble positioned so as to seemingly emanate right from the corner of Maika’s eye (1.68). It is such visual depictions of their connection that further encourage readers to reserve judgment on precisely where they should be drawing the line between girl and monster, such as when in one panel Halfwolf is taken aback by the violent excess of the monstrum’s enjoyment of its release from within her, but then in the next panel the Inquisitrix dispatched to recapture Maika disgustingly calls Halfwolf a “demon” (1.97). This provocative blurring of boundaries suggested by the interplay of graphic and textual elements is, in other words, a crucial component to the work’s potential (re)imagining of the nexus of disability and monstrosity. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in Volume Two Maika eases into an uneasy truce with her monstrum as they not only experience increasing access to one another’s thoughts and memories but actually strike up something of an inner conversation. She learns that the monstrum has a name, Zinn, and is similarly attempting to remember the past in order to understand the present. Zinn relives snippets of conversation with his sister-​brother Hajin, as they debated whether to end their exile to the Shadow Plains (a banishment they had accepted so they “would not become murderers” [2.103] and thereby avoid the destruction of the known world). Zinn recalls callously remarking, “The creatures who inhabit this world are insignificant, unworthy of our beneficence” (2.103). Crucially, Zinn now regretfully observes, regarding that comment, “I was a fool” (2.103). All the more significantly, Zinn is able to access this past seemingly only through his connection to Halfwolf, as their memories appear intertwined on a fascinating page of panels visually and verbally depicting a reflective and even sensitive Zinn, at times almost humanoid in appearance, being led by the hand into the light of his long-​ago memories by a version of Maika when she was a little girl (2.92). While details are still few by the end of Volume Two, it seems Zinn ended up betraying Hajin, either killing her or causing her death. But his current self-​questioning suggests his potential for growth. Near the end of Volume Two, during a mortal showdown with a hidden surviving Ancient, Lord Rohar the Insatiable (also known as the Blood Fox), Zinn hears the words of both his sister-​brother and his beloved Shaman Empress encouraging him. The former warns him, “Your arrogance will only lead to suffering…and war…You must wake up…You must open your mind”; the latter, “Do not stop becoming someone new…Move forward always” (2.130). Zinn worries, “What I  am…cannot truly change,” and the Blood Fox attempts to seize on his doubts while simultaneously trying to tricking Maika into siding with the Ancient over the Old God: “The monster wishes to cast the greatest illusion of all. That it is one of us” (2.131). The Blood Fox here performs a double othering, ostensibly excluding the monster from a connection he insists Maika shares with him (“us”) when in reality he rejects her as a “repulsive mongrel” (2.131). It remains uncertain where the series will go, but it seems Maika must embrace her partnership with Zinn (and, thereby, accept her identity as the titular Monstress). Liu has described the story as Halfwolf ’s journey to “relearn what it is to be human,” a journey during which “Maika is going to discover her humanity through this monster, and the monster is going to discover itself as well” (“Marjorie”). This reciprocity is essential, especially as Liu conceives of Halfwolf ’s lived experience of disability, her “psychic wounds” as well as her “physical ones,” pejoratively as examples of her brokenness, of how “monstrousness…deforms people –​how it deforms their psyches, how it deforms their bodies and how it deforms worlds” (“Marjorie”). At the start of Volume Two, Maika remembers her mother telling her, “The world breaks us all. But strength can flow from those broken places” (2.8). Maika’s seems to be a world in which brokenness, impurity, hybridity, difference have the chance to be reconceived, as shows of strength rather 61

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than of weakness or defectiveness. Liu’s primary foci where Halfwolf ’s intersectional identity is concerned are race and gender, not disability. Still, granting the more fundamental roles of gender and race, Maika’s experience is also profoundly impacted by disability, and not just her missing arm; indeed, the challenge of living with post-​traumatic stress, along with the psychic struggle/​connection with her inner “monster,” are, arguably, central aspects of her character. Thus, even though there isn’t much evidence that Liu set out to offer readers a strong disabled protagonist, the text nonetheless provides such a character, a complex embodiment of the nexus of monstrosity and disability. Like Monstress, Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters productively fosters an awareness of the generative intersectionality between disability and other identity categories while vitally moving toward a more quotidian context for the lived experience of these aspects of identity. The main markers of difference that Ferris is concerned with are class and sexuality. Surprisingly, disability is not as explicitly represented as in Liu’s Monstress, even though Ferris was disabled as a child. She describes herself as experiencing “years of extreme pain” owing to severe scoliosis until corrective surgery when she was ten (Ferris, “The Holocaust”). Further, perhaps not uncoincidentally, Ferris was recovering from extensive paralysis in the wake of encephalitis and meningitis when she started this project. It is hard, then, given both these biographical details and the long history of monstrosity as a popular means of representing disability, not to read Ferris’s conception of monstrosity as a stand-​in for disability. Indeed, even without an explicit framing of disability as monstrosity, MFTIM already has staked a claim to being one of the genre’s most important representations of disability. A large part of what has made this book such a runaway success is the extent to which its art trades off of the aesthetic of classic horror films and pulp monster magazines, capturing their appeal for younger audiences in particular. In fact, throughout the graphic novel, Ferris features 25 full-​color splash pages purporting to be the cover of one of the protagonist’s mags (with titles like Arcane, Dread, Ghastly, Ghoulish, Horrific, and Terror). In one example, Robotic Hybrids of Zombieland, the monsters gracing this particular cover draw upon popular stereotypes of the developmentally disabled, psych ward patients, and people with facial “deformities,” thereby subtly creating a haunting underlying human presence within these ostensibly inhuman creatures, even as their status as robotic hybrids on another level further distances them from any genuine articulation with the human (207).This complex effect replicates the text’s broader engagement with the popular tradition of monsters that are often somehow sympathetic even as they are first and foremost so frightful. Ferris’s literary representation of monstrosity primarily revolves around her protagonist  –​ who sees herself as a monster, who wishes she was a monster, and who is drawn as a monster –​ ten-​year-​old Karen Reyes. As such, even though this little monster goes around in makeshift detective garb as she tries to piece together a couple of potentially terrible mysteries, Ferris’s lovingly tongue-​in-​cheek evocation of the noir and horror genres actually moves readers closer to a more realistic consideration of the lived experience of disability than Liu’s magical hybrid-​ warrior in Monstress. One might not suspect this to be the case, however, when Ferris’s narrative opens with Karen dreaming that she is transforming into a werewolf as her neighbors form a mob to kill the source of the horrible howls they hear. Not only do they spew angry threats against the “freak” (8)/​“monster” (10) they seek, the mob members are scary in their own right owing to the exaggerated way in which Ferris draws their faces, even as they are simultaneously mocked through little details like some of them wielding spatulas, phones, and suitcases in addition to baseball bats and torches (13–​14). Karen wakes as she is about to be shot, and although she is no longer the large, imposing werewolf from her dream, her actual appearance is nonetheless as a little human-​werewolf hybrid, very furry, with sharp teeth and clawed feet. 62

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During her days, Ferris’s little monster-​ g irl is subject to incessant name-​ calling at school: crazy, creep, dirty, disgusting, dog, dumb, freak, gross, hillbilly, idiot, loser, sicko, stinky, stupid, ugly, weirdo, to name a few. Some of these slurs rely on the long history of animality being attributed not only to women and the indigenous but to the disabled as well, a problem taken up by Sunaura Taylor in her critical articulation of animal studies and disability studies, Beasts of Burden (2017). As many of these epithets suggest, though, she is teased in large part because she is poor. Karen lives in a small basement apartment with her single mom and her adult brother, Deeze. Her (imaginary) friend Sandy –​a coalminer’s daughter who “looks pale” and is “always hungry” because she is “skin and bones” (96) –​embodies her anxieties about class and poverty. Karen is definitely aware of how others judge her by her socioeconomic status. At the same time, given the fact that Ferris based Karen’s character on her own childhood, a disability studies approach to this monstrous body understands particular labels such as “freak” and “ugly” as reflecting a more dramatic physical difference than just the sort of “dirty” and “stinky” appearance bullies might attribute to an underprivileged background. While none of the illustrations present Karen as having a hunched back or spinal curve or uneven legs, Karen’s identification as a werewolf, especially during the aforementioned transformation scene, evokes the pain Ferris experienced before, as well as after, corrective surgery. The intersectionality of Ferris’s representation of monstrosity extends beyond the all-​too-​ often overlapping difficulties of disability and poverty, however. For one, Karen’s adoption of an alternative, even celebratory conception of hers as a monstrous body directly relates to the fact that she likes girls. She is in love with her friend Missy, whom she used to bond with over monster fandom until Missy’s wealthy mother ended their friendship because she disapproved of Karen’s poverty. Whenever Karen pictures them together in a romantic light, she is a werewolf and Missy is a vampire. The connection between sexual difference and monstrosity is strengthened through a classmate who befriends Karen:  Franklin, a man-​size boy with severe facial scarring, the comic’s Frankenstein character. Karen and Franklin, who is gay, bond in part because they both face derision over their monstrous bodies (and their monstrous nonnormative desire). For instance, on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, a well-​dressed African-​American gentleman verbally assaults the two kids instead of providing the distraught Franklin with the sympathy he is seeking: “Freaks and queers don’t have any place near decent men and women!” (282). Franklin and Karen face rejection both for how they look and how they love. The Franklin plotline further reinforces disabled monstrosity’s intersectionality with race/​ ethnicity, for Karen’s conception of her monstrosity is also connected to her family’s mixed-​race background. Her father was Mexican and her mother part Appalachian Irish and part Native American. Race is central to the representations of monstrosity offered throughout the book’s second main plotline, the story of Karen’s recently deceased neighbor, Anka Silverberg. Anka, who experienced a number of mental health issues throughout her life, was a Holocaust survivor. Her life in Germany –​first as she grows up in the brothel where her emotionally unstable mother worked, then as she finds herself from a young age entrapped in sex work, and lastly as she experiences deportation to one of the camps –​was a real-​life horror story. Significantly, Anka is never demonized for her struggles, but is represented in a thoroughly sympathetic light; as her husband insists during his defence of her to Karen, “After so many years of her admittedly odd…uh…behavior, it would be understandable if you’d concluded that…Anka was… mad…but in truth Anka was an unconventional hero…” (137). Indeed, Anka’s life story, so profoundly impacted by both race and disability, plays a central role in Karen’s developing distinction between good monsters like her werewolves and vampires and bad monsters such as Nazis and rapists. 63

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In a terrible scene in which Karen is only seconds away from being gang raped for being a “freak” (246), she thinks of Anka. She says,“Right that minute I knew the bullies wanted to hurt my soul in a way that they hoped would turn my body into a coffin” (243). “In that sweaty panicky moment,” she continues, “I saw that using that way to drive a spirit towards death was the act of a bad, weak, soul-​ugly monster,” and then she hears Anka whispering in her ear, “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi. A Nazi is a person who chooses to not see anything that would keep them from being cruel” (243). A group of boys have been harassing her on a daily basis, spitting on her and calling her names. As her notebook drawings of a werewolf dismembering these bullies reveal, her self-​identification as a monster is in part a direct response to the disempowerment she feels as an object of ridicule. To the would-​be rapists, who see her body as a “pile of crap” (246), this violent act is about hurting and humiliating her, but luckily, with Anka’s voice telling her to resist and fight, she is able to delay them just enough for help to arrive. She kicks the lead attacker in the groin, bloodies his nose, and then Franklin arrives to run them all off just as they have regrouped to assault her once again. Karen’s insight here regarding the idea of bad monsters anticipates the focus of the book’s final scenes, particularly a flashback Karen has to her thoughts about a poster Deeze used to have in his room depicting demons tormenting a helpless victim. She relates, “Back then I already knew I wanted to be a monster…But looking at that poster I knew there were good monsters and bad ones…” (367). “The bad monsters,” she continues, “want the world to look the way they want it to.They need people to be afraid” (368).While the good monsters “live in their lair and mostly mind their own biz,” only “sometimes giv[ing] somebody a[n]‌[unintended] fright because they’re weird looking and fangy…a fact that is beyond their control,” the bad monsters “are all about control…They want the whole world to be scared so that bad monsters can call the shots” (368). It is possible that some will view Karen’s monstrosity as merely a childhood fantasy, an escapism she needs to outgrow with age. And, in fact, in a sad scene in the wake of their mother’s death, a drunk Deeze seems to be trying to push her to grow up through precisely such an acknowledgment, when he stands her in front of a mirror and makes her look at her reflection. He tells her she is “a girl! Not Larry Talbot three quarters the way to being the fucking wolfman” (355). Significantly, for the only time in the whole book, Karen’s face in this panel is fully human –​no fur, no fangs. But Deeze seems to realize this attempt to strip her of the monstrosity she relies on for empowerment is misguided –​for, just a little bit later, when he begins to broach the subject again, saying, “You do realize that I’ve been humoring you about monsters…Monsters are not real…” he looks at her, hesitates, and backtracks, “er uh, real… really smart enough to understand…what an absolutely wonderful monster you’d make” (370). As one might expect, the pain of losing her mother leads to a lot of questions for Karen, and in the book’s final scene she recounts a dream she had in which Anka and Saint Christopher the Werewolf Saint were arguing, with the latter urging Karen to seek vengeance on her beloved monsters for not saving her mom (charging them with refusing to allow her to live on as one of the undead like them). She lashes out and violently destroys their own undead lives, one by one. Afterwards, Karen feels “more hollow than ever before” (402), and as she listens to the werewolf ’s dying words readers realize that in attacking her monsters she was actually attacking herself. Ferris communicates this both visually as we watch the expiring werewolf morph into Karen and verbally when the werewolf (now looking exactly like her) tells Karen, “I should have gone into her room…I cared but I was kind of…freaked…it hurt to see how different she looked” (403). Early on, Karen counters the circular reasoning she hears from others, positing, “Because monsters couldn’t possibly be real, then they’re not real” (17). According to Karen, “The dictionary says the word monster comes from the Latin word ‘monstrum’ which means ‘to show’ 64

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(like to deMONSTRate)” (17). “The truth is that there are a lot of things,” she elaborates, “we don’t see everyday that are right under our noses –​like germs and electricity and just maybe –​ monsters are right under our noses too” (17). MFTIM demonstrates that Karen’s distinction between good monsters and bad monsters is an absolutely vital one as it allows readers to conceive of Karen’s monster identity as an empowering ownership of what amounts to an intersectional crip aesthetic, informed not only by disability but also by overlapping aspects of class, ethnicity/​race, gender, and sexuality. Ferris’s reclaiming of the monstrous body reassigns traditionally pejorative meaning to a new, celebratory context while still preserving/​reserving the long-​standing negative connotations for more appropriate designees whose monstrosity is not based upon disability whatsoever. For all its rich intersectionality, MFTIM’s progressive reimagining of the monstrous body only goes so far in that Karen is never explicitly identified as a person with a disability. For all the well-​deserved accolades that have greeted Liu’s and Ferris’s works, a humble comic by an unknown artist most fully realizes the transformative impact of a crip reappropriation of monstrosity. Helene Fischer’s Monster Girl features an autistic artist’s rendering of an autistic protagonist. It is important not merely as a literary representation of disabled monstrosity by a person with a disability, but also as a representation that is explicitly engaged in illuminating the lived experience of disability. It is also accessible to blind/​visually impaired readers –​the version in the electronic edition of All the Weight of Our Dreams (2017) provides image descriptions via ALT text for each panel. Happily, the print version provides these same descriptions in a transcript immediately following the comic, offering yet another layer to the multimodal combination of image and text. On the cover page, Fischer’s protagonist “stands with her back to the viewer in an empty, seemingly endless room” (259).The emptiness is not suggestive of vacancy, however, but instead gives “a feeling of open space,” particularly in conjunction with the brightness of Krissy Baxter’s coloring (259). Monster Girl herself has “bright red skin, two horns coming from dark hair done in two braids, and clawed hands,” plus “a little forked tail” (259). The caption reads, “I’m a monster girl” (255). In the first panel of the second page, though, Monster Girl “is now a human girl, with tan skin…hearing aids, and sad brown eyes” (259). The darker coloring of this panel is intended to convey “isolation and muted emotion” (259), in conjunction with the caption which reads, “I’m not a real monster” (256). The next two panels (which confirm a pattern of alternating between monster and human versions of Fischer’s protagonist) further the idea of her monstrosity as a social construction. In the first, Monster Girl is staring at her clawed hands, below the caption, “They just think I am” (256), implying her sadness stems from how others see her, not from her own identity. Monster Girl clearly experiences this judgment as frustrating and perplexing, which in turn leads to anger and/​or self-​doubt, as she is next drawn with clenched fists below the caption, “Am I?” (256). Significantly, as if in answer, the second row of panels shifts the sense of her monstrosity back toward that conveyed by the cover, with Monster Girl now drawn among “a huge crowd of people with indistinguishable faces” (260). There are in fact other monster shapes, but she doesn’t notice them. As the caption suggests, she is focused on her feeling of being “surround[ed]” by “dull cut outs of the same gaping face” (256). Intriguingly, in the left-​hand panel, she is not facing the others but staring back directly at the readers with an expression that might be variously interpreted as communicating her unhappiness with the situation, checking to see if readers are following her into the crowd, challenging readers to do something about the situation, or even indicating she holds readers as partly to blame for her predicament. The “dull cut outs,” the caption continues on, both in the bottom corner and then on into the next panel’s caption, are “repeated” –​repeated, as the right-​hand panel caption insists, “again and 65

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again and again and again and” (256). These panels subtly valorize autistic experience, with the bright colors and openness conveying a rich autistic sensory interaction with a world that goes far beyond a more limited focus only on other people. Moreover, neurotypical lives are the ones cast as empty and boring (“gaping” and “dull”), as narrow and patterned (“same” and “repeated”) –​a powerful inversion of standard assumptions about autistic lives. The transcript for Panel 5 provides yet another layer to the hybridity of humanity and monstrosity in that for the first time Fischer’s protagonist, when drawn without her monster features, is referred to, not as Monster Girl, but as “Human Girl” (260). Fischer then depicts Monster Girl alone again, sitting in a therapist’s office, in a setting suggestive of both of the competing versions of autistic experience, “open space and isolation” (260). The first half of the caption states, “They have a name for my kind –​for us monsters,” a name the second half plainly provides: “They call it autism” (256). This explicit identification of monstrosity with disability is crucial, as until then (other than the mention of hearing aids), there has been no explanation for what makes Monster Girl feel so different, so monstrous. Some may have assumed it was her gender; others visually may have determined it was her ethnicity. The explicit assertion of autism as the type of monstrosity being referred to here suggests the potential intersectionality of disability with racial-​or gender-​based difference, but, above all, allows for an assertion of autistic identity (“my kind”) and solidarity (“us monsters”) in place of neurotypical othering (in which “monsters” are her “kind” only because neurotypicals have labeled them as such). Even so, some decided ambiguity remains. Given that in the transcript Fischer has just raised the possibility that her protagonist has a bifurcated identity, one might wonder, is she sometimes Monster Girl and at other moments Human Girl? Must she always be either one or the other, the descriptor determined merely by how she sees herself or is seen by others in any given moment, or can she be both at the same time, regardless of the adjective employed? Might Fischer instead be suggesting the operative binary facing her protagonist is (nonautistic) human/​(autistic) monster? That is, is Monster Girl code for Autistic Girl? Obviously, one is not autistic only in particular places, or at particular times, even if one’s behavior and/​or appearance may suggest otherwise, so does this mean the protagonist is always monster and human, never just one or the other, in spite of the binary? The transcript for the first four panels on page 3 continues the alternation between the identifications of Human Girl and Monster Girl. The captions on this page visually serve to encourage readers to consider the identities of Monster Girl and Human Girl as interrelated by appearing in boxes straddling across multiple panels for the first time. Fischer’s protagonist relates that her parents say she is just “un poco diferente” (the Spanish reinforcing the intersectionality of her difference with ethnicity), but then clarifies through the next caption (also straddling two panels), “I’m told by everyone else I’m a freak” (257). Strikingly, the word “freak” appears below a drawing of Human Girl, not Monster Girl. The transcript for this panel contains the third reference to the girl clenching her hands, but significantly this is the first time the response is attributed to Human Girl, a small detail but with big implications for Fischer’s blurring the binary’s lines, requiring readers to revise their take on the previous references if they understood the clenching to be a sign of autistic monstrosity.This deconstruction continues visually as well, with the captions in the second row of three panels now extending out beyond both edges of the primary panel on which they are placed (with the middle caption straddling parts of all three). Fischer moves even further toward the erasure of the line between monster and human, between autistic and non-​autistic, in the transcript. For example, in the page’s fourth panel she breaks her alternating labeling pattern, dropping the Human Girl name and calling the protagonist Monster Girl even though she is drawn without her physical traits of monstrosity in that panel:  according to the transcript, “Monster Girl is 66

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human again” (261). Powerfully, Fischer then depicts Monster Girl as crying, expressing an emotion that stereotypically one does not associate with monsters. In the final two panels of page 3, the comic only deepens the complexity of the questions about her identity. In Panel 7, Monster Girl asserts, “My identity intersects in ways they don’t understand,” and in Panel 8 Human Girl elaborates, “And I’m a monster for it. Am I?” (257). Significantly, Fischer returns in the transcript to calling her Human Girl in the second of the panels, at a stage in the narrative when the distinction between being a monster girl and a human girl now has been undermined.The first part of the caption reinforces the weakening of the binary, as Human Girl seems to be embracing her identity as a monster. Fischer’s protagonist is still in the process of searching for answers, however, as she immediately qualifies her assertion she is a monster by asking for the second time, “Am I?”The visuals would seem to suggest she is both at once, since in Panel 7 Fischer has drawn a generic shadow shape behind Monster Girl, but in Panel 8 Human Girl’s shadow has horns. Interestingly, the captions for these panels return to a self-​contained format, at the very moment when the bodies and shadows are so noticeably crossing boundaries. Even more significantly, in Panel 7 Fischer breaks for the first time the pattern of the first 13 panels, alternating between monster and human depictions of the protagonist in the drawing. Even though she was visually Monster Girl in Panel 6, she is so again in 7, while reader expectations entail they should be seeing her human version. As the comic shifts onto the last page, then, this reversal of the pattern seems to further corroborate the idea that Fischer’s protagonist is both monster and human. The caption at the very top of the first panel of the last page reinforces the notion that the primary aspect of her intersectional identity (as both Monster Girl and Human Girl) is her autism. It further insists that it is this disability that qualifies her as a monster. The caption acknowledges, “Developmental disabilities are scary to people who don’t have them” (258). Visually, though, Fischer has stepped back into the original pattern, and thus significantly it is not Monster Girl but Human Girl readers see as the visual representation of what is ostensibly so scary, so monstrous. This humanization of the ostensibly monstrous disability is then augmented by the second half of the caption, inverting the dynamic of who should be scared of whom, with Human Girl confessing, “But if they are scared, I’m terrified” (258). Precisely at this moment of vulnerability, Monster Girl sees another monster for the first time. Up until this point, Fischer’s protagonist has been alone throughout the whole comic, never having spoken to or interacted with any other person, seemingly so isolated or ostracized from everyone else all around her that any other people pictured have been drawn in the same style as the aforementioned “dull cut outs” with “indistinguishable faces.” Now, however, one of these outline shapes has come into focus for her, and she sees a girl with “blue scaly skin” who is “muttering to herself ” (262). The caption captures her important realization: “I am not the only ‘monster’ out there” (258). Fischer’s decision to place the word “monster” in quotation marks for the first and only time foregrounds the constructed nature of the category, but does not prevent such so-​called monsters from appropriating this construction as an empowering identity marker and as a means of establishing welcome relationships. Indeed, the next caption reads, “We just have to find each other” (258), while Human Girl, “pulling her headphones off, gets the attention” of an African-​American girl “wearing the same clothes as the blue monster girl from the previous panel” (262). The transcript for the following panel explicitly confirms this arc toward shared monstrosity as a means of fostering connection. The new monster, now officially christened Blue Scaly Girl, “looks sideways at Monster Girl who waves,” and happily “there is a feeling of immediate solidarity and understanding between the two girls” (263). Fischer visually signals the significant shift taking place by (also for the first and only time) providing a slant rather than 67

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a vertical gutter between panels in the same tier. The caption, returning to the notion of scared rather than scary monsters, reads, “Then we can be scared together” (258). Intriguingly, right after the word “together,” the next panel features a close-​up of Blue Scaly Girl smiling, the only panel in which Fischer’s protagonist does not appear. The image is a powerful one, requiring readers to expand their view of the comic’s focus only on Monster Girl’s perspective, reinforced by the lack of any caption (which are used to convey Monster Girl’s thoughts), making it the first panel without any text. What is more, this close-​up on the new character visually positions readers in Monster Girl’s place, as the object of Blue Scaly Girl’s gaze and as the one gazing back at Blue Scaly Girl, inviting a novel and potentially revolutionary identification with Monster Girl’s subject position (instead of always looking at her). Fischer also indicates the panel’s importance through a second (and last) disruption to the pattern of alternating monster and human depictions, which the first three panels featuring the two girls had (re)established. Then, in the penultimate panel, “The two girls (human again) link hands” (263). Compellingly, though, the final panel’s description reads, “The two girls (monsters now) walk through the park, holding hands” (263). Fischer’s decision to end not with characters who have shed monstrosity for humanity but rather who have found connection through their shared monstrosity speaks volumes. The penultimate panel, as in the preceding one depicting Blue Scaly Girl’s face, lets the image of their joined hands do all the talking, without a caption. With the final panel, though, readers are returned to the protagonist’s commentary with the caption, “And maybe one day, not at all” (258). Powerfully, the caption does not express a wish to one day no longer be monsters –​their shared hope is, rather, not to have to be scared.Visually, the image reinforces the positivity and the optimism of the story’s arc, its foreground consisting of dark outlines of trees and bushes the girls are leaving behind.They face away from readers and toward the open space of the path in front of them, an even more effective graphic rendition of “the feeling of open space” than the cover page, with the latter’s encroaching darkness here replaced by horizon and sky, beckoning the two companions toward a shared, not scared, future. Monstress, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, and Monster Girl each offer a complex tapestry of the nexus of disability and monstrosity, suggesting various enabling possibilities for a crip re-​ visioning of disabled monstrosity that incorporates the insights of an inclusive intersectionality. They embody the particularly promising potential such a hybrid genre holds for the deconstruction of traditional templates and the (re)construction of empowering alternatives to monstrosity. All three suggest the extent to which the approach to places and spaces labeled with “Here There Be Monsters” may productively produce excitement and empathy instead of hatred and horror.

Note 1 All uses of boldface in direct quotations are original to the primary texts, not my own emphasis.

Works cited Cassuto, Leonard. “Freak.” In Keywords for Disability Studies. Eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin. New York: New York University Press, 2015, 85–​88. Erevelles, Nirmala. Disability and Difference in Global Contexts:  Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ferris, Emil. “The Holocaust, Art, Chicago & Sickness.” Interview by Hillary Brown. Paste, February 23, 2017. Accessed September 5, 2018. —​—​—​. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters [Book One]. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphic Books, 2017.

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Disability and monstrosity Fischer, Helene. Monster Girl. In All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism. Eds. Lydia X. Z. Brown, E. Ashkenazy, and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu. Lincoln, NE: DragonBee P, 2017. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies:  Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. —​—​—​. “Integrating Disability,Transforming Feminist Theory.” In The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed. Ed. Lennard Davis. New York: Routledge, 2013, 333–​53. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. Liu, Marjorie. “Action at a Distance.” Interview by Brigid Alverson. Comic News, November 8, 2016. Accessed September 5, 2018. —​—​—​. “Marjorie Liu Raises Dark Questions.” Interview by Robert Tutton. Paste, November 4, 2015. Accessed September 5, 2018. —​—​—​. Monstress,Volumes One and Two. Illus. Sana Takeda. Berkeley, CA: ImageComics, 2016–​17. McRuer, Robert, and Anna Mollow, eds. Sex and Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. The Biopolitics of Disability:  Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Schalk, Sami.“Reevaluating the Supercrip.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 10.1 (2016): 71–​86. Shaeffer, Katherine, and Spencer Chalifour. “Introduction.” ImageTexT 8.1 (2015): n. pag. Dept. of English, University of Florida. Accessed September 5, 2018. Siebers, Tobin. “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment—​For Identity Politics in a New Register.” The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed. Ed. Lennard Davis. New York: Routledge, 2013, 278–​97. —​—​—​. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737–​54. Taylor, Sunaura. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York: The New Press, 2017.

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6 SPECTRALITY, STRANGENESS, AND STIGMAPHILIA Gothic and critical disability studies Sara Wasson Let us not mince words: representations of disability in Gothic literature have most often been toxic, limiting, and corrosive. How, then, might there be a case for resurrecting the term as of potential value in the discourse of critical disability studies? In this chapter, I describe the ongoing dangers of Gothic in disability representation, but also argue that in some cases, a Gothic mode of representation can be used to effectively indict suffering ensuing from social and environmental maladaptation. Furthermore, I suggest that a representational mode preoccupied with suffering and estrangement can mesh with increasing scholarly interest in recognising the affective complexity of disability experience, complicating the division between disability and impairment, and contemplating the disorienting temporal structures that can characterise experience within maladaptive environments. I will close by briefly illustrating my argument with reference to texts that use Gothic conventions and intertextualities to explore disability, social exclusion, and impairment. In the process, I will explore the concept of stigmaphilia, in two registers, and I will propose the concept “stigmaphilia in a minor key.” This chapter makes a case for the value of the sad, the strange, and the spectral.1

The perils of a Gothic mode in disability representation Since the eighteenth century, Gothic can at times be understood less as a genre than a mode occupying other literary genres (Botting 14). While a challenge to define, the texts typically brought under this catholic critical umbrella tend to share characteristic qualities of emotion, time, and space. The emotions its protagonists typically feel include horror, terror, paranoia, and melancholy (Smith 84; Punter 184; Botting 3). Readers have a different response (see Spooner and Jones), so my comments here apply to the intra-​textual worlds engendered by the fictions. Within these textual worlds, fraught emotion colours the experience of both space and time. Gothic often features claustrophobic spaces of confinement, febrile distortions of time, and ancient –​even supernatural –​threat. Protagonists are frequently vulnerable, distressed, and struggling within cryptic and hostile conditions. It is immediately clear, then, that such a mode poses multiple dangers for disability representation. I will review three: a preoccupation with protagonists enduring misery and isolation; traditions of depicting unconventional bodies and minds in terms of monstrosity; and the way the mode lends itself to a narrative of an individual fallen into misfortune. 70

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Firstly, Gothic’s emphasis on anguish is directly counter to core tenets of disability studies. Disability studies often emphasises the need to differentiate disability and impairment.A medicalised view of disability defines it in terms of somatic, cognitive, or emotional impairment of function, seeing the cause of disability in terms of an individual’s flawed body or mind to be cured or managed through medical intervention. The social model of disability, by contrast, understands disability as a function of a stigmatising society and a maladapted environment (Oliver). Disability is not the same thing as impairment, and neither should mean misery or isolation.There is urgent political necessity to refuse despairing representations of disability (Davis; Finger; Linton; Siebers; Garland-​Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies; Couser, Recovering Bodies). Bill Hughes, for example, justly condemns the “personal tragedy” framing of disability, in which “disabled people are cast as ‘unfortunates’… in the dark throes of great suffering,” in a state of “ruin, a blighted life” (70–​71). Such negativity facilitates continued marginalisation of people living with disability, in that it positions disability as a consequence of personal misfortune to be remedied by medicalised cures and paternalistic charity instead of being remedied by making environments more accessible and society less exclusionary. Even more dangerously, a life of suffering is sometimes seen as devalued life not worth living  –​and perhaps one that should be taken away, as contemporary debates over euthanasia make disturbingly clear (Finger; Overboe; Torrell; Siebers). There continues to be an urgent need for narratives of disability experience to, as G. Thomas Couser says, “counter the too often moralizing, objectifying, pathologizing, and marginalizing representations of disability in contemporary culture” (“Disability” 606). Indeed, Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson argues for “seeing disabled bodies…as extraordinary rather than abnormal,” and celebrates literature that hails disability in affirmative ways (Extraordinary Bodies 137, 108). The term “disability gain” denotes the way that at times, “conditions of impairment are regarded not as limiting or crippling but as enabling new epistemological and political forms” (Davidson, “Cripping Consensus” 433). In its relentless interest in fear and distress, Gothic seems diametrically opposed to the important political goal of countering negative representations of disability. Secondly, many Gothic texts abound in ideologically poisonous representations of somatic or cognitive variation in terms of monstrosity. The term is etymologically rooted in the words monstrare (to show) and monere (to warn), and somatically divergent bodies have been read symbolically since ancient times, as signs of divine warning, markers of warped maternal imagination, or the outward signifier of a flawed genetic code, and more (Shildrick, Embodying the Monster; Garland-​Thomson, “From Wonder to Error”). Diverse though these meanings may be, the term “monster” has rarely had positive connotations. Furthermore, the symbolic repertoire “monster” accretes in any era can be read as a subset of the toxic narrative devices of “discursive dependency” and “narrative prosthesis,” identified by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, in which disabled characters are used as plot catalysts and metaphorical shorthand for narratives that ultimately support a non-​disabled imaginary, eliding the ways disability is socially manufactured and diminishing the experience of people living with disability. Even when such symbolic substitution may seem less hostile –​for example, making a particular disability symbolic of a state of social precarity, rather than evil –​it remains highly problematic to recruit disabled bodies to such symbolic labours. As Michael Davidson warns, cultural forms depend on a putatively normal body to reinforce regimes of national, racial and sexual normalcy while using the person with a cognitive or physical impairment as a metaphor for the queer, subaltern, or marginal.  …permitting dominant social structures to be written on the body of a person who is politely asked to step offstage once the metaphoric exchange is made. (“Concerto” 615) 71

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Such symbolic moves erase the social complexity of the lived experience of disability or illness, and reduce people with disability to figures to bolster a non-​disabled imaginary. Without question, these representations have risks. It has been suggested that demonising representations of disability and monstrosity might be partially detoxified through readerly self-​awareness of Gothic as a fantastical and non-​realist mode (Anolik 186). In response to that defence, however, I echo Marie Mulvey-​Roberts’s cautionary question: “how hermetic is the Gothic container?…The Gothic monster has been a rallying point for cultural, nationalist or religious hegemonies, seldom aware of how they too participate in the creation of monstrosity” (3–​4). I, too, would suggest that when Gothic is used as narrative prosthesis, in particular, no degree of critical awareness can wholly purge it of representational risks. In other words, I am not trying to recuperate all Gothic writing. Gothic’s characteristic preoccupation with narratives of injury, deterioration, fall, and exile is a third significant problem for conjunctions of Gothic and disability representation. Such tropes are common in illness narration and have long been explored by medical humanities in terms of heroic effort to find meaning in illness and build a new coherence from a life purportedly “shattered” by illness (Charon 1898; cf. Frank; Hawkins), although scholars are increasingly challenging the valorisation of “coherence” (Hyvarinen et al.; Woods; Whitehead; Wasson, “Creative Manifesto” and “Before Narrative”). Disability studies, in turn, has long resisted these tropes of interrupted life, spurning the rehabilitative arc that accompanies that framing metaphor and questioning the assumption that a state of disability is an unnatural one that must be recuperated and corrected (Overboe 275). Images of illness as exile, of people rendered ghostly by affliction, and mourning for a pre-​illness self, can imply that illness or disability are unnatural interruptions to the story of a “normal” body.There are multiple flaws in the interruption trope. It bolsters the dangerous illusion that there is a clear binary between disability/​non-​disability, failing to recognise not only that health and “autonomy” are temporary and provisional for all of us, but also that the binary of ability/​disability is inevitably an unstable one (Goodley; Shildrick, “Critical Disability Studies”). The trope also sets a false binary between a near-​perfect prelapsarian state and an anguished fall after the catalytic event, and leaves no space for considering congenital impairments over acquired. Most dangerous of all, as a narrative structure it implictly endorses the notion that disability is synonymous with devastation and is a function of an impaired individual body and mind, rather than a maladaptive environment that must be understood intersectionally. Given these many conflicts, it may seem perverse to consider any value of conjoining a Gothic mode and the representation of lived experience of people with disability. Yet for the rest of this chapter I will try to make a case for exactly that.

Stigmaphilia in a minor key: uses of the Gothic The term “stigmaphilia” gained currency in the early years of queer theory, when Michael Warner used the term to describe a defiant embrace of a stigmatised position without acceding to pressures to make that position more conventional, “finding a commonality with those who suffer from stigma, and in this alternative realm to value the very things that the rest of the world despises” (43).The work of Warner, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and others sought to recuperate the abject, taking stigma as a starting point for subversive, collective political action. Sedgwick and others use “queer” rather than “gay and lesbian” partially to denote how these moves are not only about resisting stigmatised alienation as an endpoint, but actually marshalling it for transformative action; not only converting shame to pride, in other words, but also challenging normative social assumptions around monogamy and reproductive futurity, for example. This process is not about desiring stigma per se, but rather about occupying stigmatised positions in 72

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the spirit of transformation, creative new solidarities, and subversive joy. Sedgwick, for example, observes that stigmatised queer experience is “a near-​inexhaustible source of transformational energy,” with “experimental, creative, performative force” (609; cf. Butler). As Heather Love says, with some ambivalence, “Although Sedgwick contrasts queer politics to blandly affirmative gay politics, her own discussion of the term ‘queer’ rests on an ‘affirmative reclamation’ ” (106), as such, this work is about “transforming the base material of social abjection into the gold of political agency” (18). More recently, a similar alchemy is invoked in contemporary “crip theory” (McRuer 35–​36; cf. Chen et  al.), which adopts queer theory’s deconstructive strategies and stigmaphilic solidarity in the service of challenging not only social conventions but also disability studies’ own orthodoxies. Yet this defiant alchemy may at times require a forgetting. As Love warns, “The premium on strategic response in queer studies” (and I would add, some strands of disability studies) “has meant that the painful and traumatic dimensions…have been minimised or disavowed” (3–​4). She continues: I am concerned that queer studies, in its haste to refunction such experiences, may not be adequately reckoning with their powerful legacies.Turning away from past degradation to a present or future affirmation means ignoring the past as past; it also makes it harder to see the persistence of the past in the present. (19) While respecting how affirmative approaches are of enormous value, Love argues that we must not let suffering be forgotten within these labours: we need “a politics that allows for damage” (162). Anything less than that means forgetting that suffering is not just personal, but historical and social; that trauma, for example, is not just a personal experience but also “a name for experiences of socially situated political violence” which continues to reverberate in the present (Cvetkovich 3). Sara Ahmed warns: Ethics cannot be about moving beyond pain…without imposing new forms of suffering on those who do not or cannot move in this way…These histories have not gone: we would be letting go of that which persists in the present. To let go would be to keep those histories present. (216–​17) At times, an affirmative imperative can lead to a state which Deborah Steinberg has, in a different context, called the “I estranged” (123), a profound denial of the reality that loss, grief, and mystery can be part of disability or chronic illness experience. So in discussing Gothic in representations of disability with illness, I propose the concept of “stigmaphilia in a minor key.” This is not a counter-​definition to the transformative processes McRuer, Warner, and Sedgwick celebrate, but is rather a shift in emphasis, in register. In its minor key, stigmaphilia is oriented less towards the telos of transformation, and more towards the initial stage of dwelling with distress. The musical metaphor invokes the way that music in a minor key connotes sadness, grief, and a dying fall. I suggest such stigmaphilia in a minor key can describe a writerly affiliation, a writing craft that deliberately draws close to the textures of pain, shame, and wounds, both stigma and stigmata. It can also describe readerly positions, such as Love’s own queer historiography. I find stigmaphilia in a minor key in a wide range of contemporary writers of poetry and prose, including Danielle Pafunda, Leslie Jamison, Christine Friedlander, Johanna Hedva, and Sonya Huber. While all these writers differ in important ways, each at times uses an anguished, claustrophobic, and tortured register to offer a kind of nightmare realism, an accurate comment on the effects of intersectional structural marginalisation 73

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and/​or impairment. As I say elsewhere, there is value in capturing the affective labour of endurance, understanding “the present as not yet an event but rather a suspended impasse, a waiting and reaching, within a…particular…social and medical milieu” (“Before Narrative” 5). In valuing the initial dwelling with the image of wound, of unfinished injury (including from socially inflicted suffering), I am arguing here that valuable work is done by representations of time frozen and interrupted, images of impasse, stasis, and repetition. In the context of disability representation, making space for dwelling on particular kinds of disorienting subjective horror can be important in two ways. Gothic’s preoccupation with distress can itself be a useful counter to forms of positivity that can lead to excluding some people’s experience of disability and chronic illness. Furthermore, since the Gothic is characterised by specific idiosyncracies of space and time, it can be deployed as a highly situated mode indicting particular maladaptive environments and the suffering which these spawn. Disability studies has a deep investment in speaking of impairment in ways that are either neutral or positive, and of focusing on the causes of suffering as social rather than personal. A clear distinction between impairment and disability is central to the social model so influential in founding texts of disability studies (Oliver). Yet it is increasingly recognised that if bodily impairment and suffering are elided from disability studies, then certain people’s experience will also be marginalised. Liz Crow was one of the first to make this argument, warning that while the social model has transformed and indeed saved lives, the orthodoxy of disability positivity can lead to dangerous erasures of people with particular experiences of impairment: The experience of impairment is not always irrelevant, neutral or positive. …Many of us remain frustrated and disheartened by pain, fatigue, depression and chronic illness, including the way they prevent us from realizing our potential or railing fully against disability…we mourn past activities that are no longer possible for us. (4–​5) Similarly, Susan Wendell affirms the social model’s refusal to equate disability and illness, yet warns that the two categories may overlap for some people in ways that require us to recognise impairment in terms that may well be negative, and illness and disability can coexist. Wendell differentiates “healthy” and “unhealthy disabled,” and describes multiple kinds of alienation that can develop between the two groups. People living with disability and chronic illness may be engaged with medical treatment, may wish for medical cure, or may have disabilities that are unpredictable and invisible, and may thus be seen as less credible –​not only by healthcare practitioners, but also by fellow disability activists. People with disabling chronic illness can feel enormous pressure to deny suffering, impairment, and grief. Efforts to nuance the social model with recognition of embodiment have continued. Alison Kafer’s “political–​relational model,” for example, echoes the social model in the way it continues to see the disability as caused by maladaptive environments and a stigmatising society, yet resists a sharp distinction between impairment and disability, understanding both impairment and disability as social and refusing to erase “the lived realities of impairment,” including the possibility of mourning (6–​7). Similarly, Margrit Shildrick describes critical disability studies as emphasising “a new focus on the significance of embodiment; an awareness of the workings of the cultural imaginary; a deconstruction of binary thought in favour of the fluidity of all categories; and a recognition that emotion and affect are as important as the material aspects of life” (“Critical Disability Studies” 32). Drawing on queer theory and other theoretical traditions inflected by post-​structuralism, approaches such as these share an interest in deconstructing binaries characteristic of ableist and of disability studies discourse, while remaining committed to social reform. 74

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Within a purely social model of disability, distress about impairment may be read as false consciousness, as a person failing to understand that their distress is not due to the impairment but rather to a hostile and stigmatising environment and psycho-​emotional disablism, leading to internalised stigma.Without a doubt, this is a common reality.Yet seeing all such distress as “false consciousness” would be highly problematic, in that it would explicitly delegitimate the lived experience of particular people who are already highly marginalised. This is particularly salient in the case when disability coincides with chronic and invisible illness. Havi Carel and Ian James Kidd observe that many such patients already undergo “epistemic injustice” in healthcare, being seen as non-​credible sources with regard to their own condition (529). With some people’s distress already marginalised in this way within medicalised frameworks, it is a bitter twist if disability studies discourses repeat that erasure. At such moments, a mandatory positivity within disability discourse would inadvertently reinforce a damaging element of medicalised care cultures. Any such parallel is of course deeply ironic, since the positivity of disability studies is necessary specifically to resist medicalisation of impairment.Yet the fact remains that positivity is also central to the idealised affective proprieties of neoliberal patienthood, which involves particular affective imperatives for the ill. A “positive attitude,” ranging from faith in a cure to positivity in daily self-​management, is held up as both enhancing health and morally laudable (Jain; Ehrenreich; Steinberg; Wasson, “Before Narrative”). While such affective discipline can be helpful for many, at times its price can be estrangement from the “surreal” registers of the body, in Nancy Miller’s phrase, in which we may doubt our experiences and feel required to suppress distress (208–​9). These texts are not only valuable for the way in which they flout the positivity imperative that continues to (rightly) characterise much disability studies analysis.They can also be effective in communicating social injustice. Since the Gothic is characterised by confined spaces and disjointed temporality, it can actually be deployed as a highly situated mode lending itself well to indictments of specific maladaptive environments and the suffering they spawn. The disjointed temporalities of a Gothic mode can be apposite for temporalities that can characterise disability and chronic illness, and Gothic representations of claustrophobia and confinement can be apt spatial tropes for describing experiences as mobility restriction in insufficiently adapted built environments, or being immured in Kafkaesque systems for verifying welfare eligibility under neoliberal austerity protocols, or the experience of being contained –​even surgically reshaped –​ within medicalised frameworks of care that pathologise difference.

Vampires, live burial, and flesh-​made cloth Next, I will briefly discuss several texts which deploy a constellation of Gothic tropes and a preoccupation with impasse and strange movement in time. In such cases, the Gothic triad of confined space, disjointed temporality, and distressing emotion is deployed here not (only) to express hidden anxieties of a culture, that traditional anxiety model of Gothic criticism, but rather as a productive and speculative mode, formulating visions of the human and social (dis) connection (Hurley 6; Wasson, Transplantation Gothic). Ellen Samuels draws on imagery of the living dead to describe her experience of living with the genetic condition Ehlers-​Danlos syndrome, in which the collagen throughout her body is fragile, affecting all her organs, tissues, skin, giving rise to permanent pain and an unnatural appearance of youth. She is a disability studies scholar, and she challenges the imperative to celebrate that continues to be an important strand of disability studies rhetoric. In particular, she wishes to explore the temporal aspects of her experience of both disability and of suffering, and she does this by glossing six negative dimensions of “crip time.” “Crip time” has become a 75

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precious and familiar term among many of us living with disability.The term originated within disability communities to describe the way things take longer with disability due to disablist barriers, impairment, and other obstacles. The term has also taken on an additional dimension, to challenge assumptions around accelerated society and normative futurity (Kafer). Samuels cherishes these transformative meanings of crip time, but also wishes to speak of the more difficult aspects of time, as she lives it. To that end, she offers supplementary definitions: crip time is “time travel,” “grief time,” “broken time,” “sick time”, “writing time,” and “vampire time.” As part of her challenge to affective propriety, she implies an identification with an iconic Gothic monster. While the monster trope has almost always been used to radically “other” people in denigrating ways, it has occasionally been used to more positive ends, particularly in the first person. Garland-​Thomson, for example, takes this stance when she writes, “Those of us who have been known since antiquity as ‘monsters’ and more recently as ‘freaks’ defy the ordinary and mock the predictable, exciting both anxiety and speculation among our more banal brethren” (“From Wonder to Error” 1). Here, Garland-​Thomson celebrates somatic and cognitive uniqueness from a position of agency. Yet Samuels’s essay uses a monster trope not to celebrate, but to mourn. Samuels writes that she inhabits: vampire time…the time of late nights and unconscious days, of life schedules lived out of sync with the waking, quotidian world. It means that sometimes the body confines us to a coffin, the boundary between life and death blurred with no end in sight. Like Buffy’s Angel and True Blood’s Bill, we live out of time, watching others’ lives continue like clockwork while we lurk in the shadows. And like them, we can look deceptively, painfully young even while we age, weary to our bones. (para. 25–​28) Here, intertextualities of popular Gothic and images of atavistic monstrosity combine to convey a present, past, and future made unstable, in temporal disjunctures of impasse, freezing, repetition, and curse. In Samuels’s prose, the characteristic spaces and temporalities of Gothic are bent to describing body as dungeon, and time as living death. This is stigmaphilia in a minor key, representing agony without moving too quickly to emphasise its transformative potential. My next examples come from Deborah Padfield’s collection of short prose reflections from people living with chronic pain, often alongside disability. The prose appears alongside photographs co-​created with Deborah Padfield. I will consider several excerpts that draw variously on the tropes of live burial, a body transforming into cloth, and a self becoming spectral. Almost invariably showing glimpses of partial bodies or objects suspended in a black field, these images communicate fragility, isolation, and grief.Yet these extracts do not inevitably call forth “personal tragedy” interpretations of an individual disabled due to bodily impairment, but also describe social isolation within maladaptive environments. Contributors Stephen Dwoskin and Patrick Dixon draw on the image of live burial in concrete to describe their experience of physical pain, their social isolation, and their deep distress (Figure 6.1). At first, the trope of live burial is deployed to describe physical experience. Dwoskin says his condition feels like “cement being poured down my throat and filling up my body and I can’t stop it,” and Patrick Dixon uses the metaphor to describe radical limitations to movement: “slowly it sets and then you cannot move” (Padfield 108, 81).Yet for both, the metaphor of live burial rapidly morphs to convey not only a physical experience, but also a social plight. Dixon suggests, for example, that his concrete imagery also stem from living in a city ill-​adapted for mobility: “It is as though the buildings are closing in, like the density of mixed concrete pouring. The density is not liquid, but solid” (108). Ultimately, the trope of live burial 76

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Figure 6.1  Deborah Padfield with Patrick Dixon from Deborah Padfield (2003) Perceptions of Pain. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing: p80. © Deborah Padfield, reproduced by kind permission of Dewi Lewis.

comes to signify social exclusion. Dixon continues, “I was trapped in a black isolated space –​ no one could be in it with me… .That cement suit is me” (108). These are funereal structures, marmoreal, but they describe not an ending, but an ongoing state of impasse and stasis. The Gothic imagery not only communicates distress, but captures the affective toil of enduring an insufficiently accommodating space and society. Nell Keddie and Padfield co-​create several images to communicate Keddie’s experience of living with pain from a crushed lumbar spine, facial pain, and disturbed sensation. She describes her back pain in terms of shadows and broken glass (Figure 6.2): “Glass breaks. …Can you pick it up, piece it together again? Leaving it there is terrible. Glass is very difficult to put back together again” (118). Keddie is not despairing, and is fortified by turning her pain experience into creative work. Yet despite her readiness for transformation, her words and images do not wholly forsake the place of pain. This, too, is stigmaphilia in a minor key. Overlaying images of Keddie’s body with shadows and fractured glass, Padfield and Keddie communicate invisible injury, marked on her skin in traces of light and shadow. As her image sequence progresses, the fragmented glass fractures even more minutely, multiplies and spreads, ultimately obscuring much of her flesh. To communicate her experience of facial pain and disturbed sensation, Keddie represents her skin and subdermal tissue as dead or unnaturally transformed (Figure 6.3): “it is as though I can’t feel the flesh properly, as though it were not alive…as though it had gone dead…It’s very deep, not just the surface. It is as if had turned to cloth” (113). She frames her body here in Gothic terms of (un)death and inhuman transformation, her back broken like glass, her face partially dead, her skin turned to cloth. These metaphors powerfully convey her sense of 77

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Figure 6.2  Deborah Padfield with Nell Keddie from Deborah Padfield (2003) Perceptions of Pain. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing: p119. © Deborah Padfield, reproduced by kind permission of Dewi Lewis.

estrangement from her own body. Yet her imagery also achieves something else, for she looks back at us from within the image. In Staring (2009), Garland-​Thomson describes the intersection of stare and starer as a complex dynamic within which the staree is not passive, but an agent, with a potential multitude of strategies for choreographing the encounter. Keddie’s image conveys some of this agency on the page in her direct gaze back to the camera.Yet the twist in Keddie’s image is that her image modification has placed one of her own eyes within the Gothicised cloth-​space of her face. As such, she gazes back at the viewer from within a wound, an impairment, which she has chosen to make visible. In other words, this digitally manipulated image confronts us from her position within that impairment. She claims our gaze, confronting us from her felt position, and from within the ways her life has been affected not only by the bodily change she experienced but by the social environment which has shaped how that bodily change has come to restrict her. She stares out from within the changed flesh. Her gaze claims recognition of both her suffering and her agency, but without erasing the pain. This is stigmaphilia in a minor key. In closing, a thought about ghosts. Disability studies criticism has a tradition of invoking spectres to describe scholarly transgression and power. As McRuer observes, some of our most cherished theses demonstrate how invested we are in haunting. … Absences that are somehow preternaturally present…academics startled by us or refusing to acknowledge our existence –​we like, in short, to do the haunting. (199–​200) Yet like any human endeavour, disability studies is also, inevitably, haunted, in the sense that past human suffering shapes it in ways that cannot fully be witnessed or seen and yet which continue to be highly salient in the present. This is one of the senses in which Jacques Derrida speaks of ghosts, in his call for us to be willing to be haunted. 78

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Figure 6.3  Deborah Padfield with Nell Keddie from Deborah Padfield (2003) Perceptions of Pain. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing: p115. © Deborah Padfield, reproduced by kind permission of Dewi Lewis.

No justice…seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence… (Specters xix) Derrida insists that this work must always be understood as both impossible and incomplete, an imaginative movement that is simultaneously yearning without colonising, a move which does not cease reaching for the other, yet simultaneously “leaves the other alone, outside, over there, in his death, outside of us” (Mémoires 35). In his epilogue to Crip Theory, McRuer recruits Derrida to his closing call for us to imagine a celebratory transgressive futurity, one in which crip and queer lives are no longer constrained or limited by normativities (208). I wholeheartedly echo this call.Yet what is downplayed in that epilogue is the grief that remains at the heart of Derrida’s model of spectrality (cf. Harrison; Wasson, Urban Gothic 159–​62). Such emotion continues to sit uneasily with much work of disability studies, both past and present. Disability and illness are not the same thing, and neither inevitably involves suffering. But sometimes they do coincide, and we need to continue to foster critical frameworks that can 79

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recognise and respond to the subtleties of those conjunctions. Gothic textual devices and intertextualities can support efforts to problematise divisions between disability and impairment, and to critique elements of the care context that characterise the experience of many people with disability and chronic illness. Gothic’s negativity can communicate damage wrought by structural exclusions afflicting those with disability or chronic illness, including the institutional contexts that find one’s experience unintelligible and the economic pressures that render life precarious, and it can transgress established discourses of sanctioned affect in disability representation, without eliding the still-​present “ruined state of the social world” (Love 27). That is stigmaphilia in a minor key. Distress can be read not in terms of moral failure or personal tragedy, but as a social index to a wider exclusionary biopolitical environment. For many are indeed rendered spectral, strange, or sad.

Note 1 This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/​P015085/​ 1), as part of the research network “Translating Chronic Pain.” I would also like to thank the University Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where part of this chapter was presented as a plenary address at the “Discourse of Identity II” conference in June 2016, and Manchester Metropolitan University, where part of this paper was presented as an invited talk.

Works cited Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Anolik, Ruth Bienstock. “The Infamous Svengali.” The Gothic Other, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howards. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004, pp.163–​96. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Butler, Judith. “Critically Queer.” GLQ, vol.1, no.1, November 1993, pp.17–​32. Carel, Havi, and Ian James Kidd. “Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare.” Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, vol.17, no.4, 2014, pp.529–​40. Charon, Rita. “Narrative Medicine.” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol.286, 2001, pp.1897–​902. Chen, Mel, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich. “Crip Genealogies.” 15 March 2017. www. disabilitystudiesnetwork.gla.ac.uk/​2016/​12/​22/​cfp-​crip-​genealogies/​. Couser, G. Thomas. “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation.” PMLA, vol.120, no.2, 2005, pp.602–​6. Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Crow, Liz. “Including All of Our Lives.” 1996. www.roaring-​girl.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2013/​07/​ Including-​All-​of-​Our-​Lives.pdf. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Davidson, Michael. “Concerto for the Left Hand.” PMLA, vol.120, no.2, March 2005, pp. 615–​19. Davidson, Michael. “Cripping Consensus.” American Literary History, vol.28, no.2, 2016, pp.433–​53. Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy. London: Verso, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Mémoires, trans. Jonathan Culler, Cecile Lindsey, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Welcome to Cancerland.” Harper’s Magazine, vol.303, no.1818, November 2001, pp.43–​53. Finger, Anne. Past Due. London: Women’s Press, 1991. Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Friedlander, Christine. Avant Gauze. Portland, OR: Magic Helicopter Press, 2016. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. “From Wonder to Error.” Freakery, ed. Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson. New York: New York University Press, 1996, pp.1–​22. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Goodley, Dan. Dis/​ability Studies. London: Routledge, 2014. Harrison, Paul. “After Affirmation.” GeoHumanities, vol.1, no.2, 2015, pp.285–​306.

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Spectrality, strangeness, and stigmaphilia Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. Reconstructing Illness, 2nd ed. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999. Hedva, Johanna. “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask Magazine, January 2016. www.maskmagazine.com/​not-​ again/​struggle/​sick-​woman-​theory. Huber, Sonya. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Hughes, Bill. “Fear, Pity and Disgust.” Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas. London: Routledge, 2012, pp.67–​77. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hyvärinen, Matti, Lars-​Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo, and Maria Tamboukou. “Beyond Narrative Coherence.” Beyond Narrative Coherence, ed. Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-​Christer Hyden, Marja Saarenheimo, and Maria Tamboukou. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2010, pp.1–​15. Jain, S. Lochlann. “Cancer Butch.” Cultural Anthropology, vol.22, no.4, November 2007, pp.501–​38. Jamison, Leslie. “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” VQR, 2014. www.vqronline.org/​essays-​articles/​ 2014/​04/​g rand-​unified-​theory-​female-​pain. Jones,Timothy. The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013. Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Miller, Nancy K. “The Trauma of Diagnosis.” Configurations, vol.22, no.2, Spring 2014, pp.207–​23. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prostheses.Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Mulvey-​Roberts, Marie. Dangerous Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Oliver, Michael. The Politics of Disablement. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990. Overboe, James. “Ableist Limits on Self-​Narration.” Unfitting Stories, ed. Valerie Raoul, Connie Canam, Angela Henderson, and Carla Paterson. Waterloo, Ontario:  Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007, pp.275–​82. Padfield, Deborah. Perceptions of Pain. London: Dewi Lewis, 2003. Pafunda, Danielle. Manhater. Kingston, RI: Dusie Press, 2012. Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Samuels, Ellen. “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol.37, no. 3, 2017. dx.doi. org/​10.18061/​dsq.v37i3.5824. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer Performativity.” The Novel, ed. Dorothy J. Hale. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, pp.605–​21. Shildrick, Margrit. “Critical Disability Studies.” Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas. London: Routledge, 2012, pp.30–​41. Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster. London: Sage, 2002. Siebers, Tobin. “In the Name of Pain.” Against Health, ed. Jonathan Metzl and Anna Kirkland. New York: New York University Press, 2010, pp.183–​94. Smith, Andrew. “Rethinking the Gothic.” Gothic Studies, vol.4, no.1, 2002, pp.79–​85. Spooner, Catherine. Postmillennial Gothic. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Steinberg, Deborah Lynn. “The Bad Patient.” Body and Society, vol.21, no.3, September 2015, pp.115–​43. Thomas, Carol. Sociologies of Disability and Illness. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Torrell, Margaret Rose. “Interactions.” Life Writing, vol.13, no.1, 2016, pp.87–​93. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal. New York: Free Press, 1999. Wasson, Sara. Transplantation Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming. Wasson, Sara. “Before Narrative:  Episodic Reading and Representations of Chronic Pain.” Medical Humanities, July 2018, Online First, 5 January 2018. www.mh.bmj.com/​content/​early/​2018/​01/​11/​ medhum-​2017–​011223. Wasson, Sara. “Creative Manifesto:  Translating Chronic Pain.” 2017. Translating Chronic Pain, AHRC Research Network, Lancaster University. www.wp.lancs.ac.uk/​translatingpain/​creative-​manifesto/​. Wasson, Sara. Urban Gothic of the Second World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2010. Wendell, Susan. “Unhealthy Disabled.” Hypatia, vol.16, no.4, 2001, pp.17–​33. Whitehead, Anne.“The Medical Humanities.” Medicine, Health and the Arts, ed.Victoria Bates, Alan Bleakley, and Sam Goodman. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014, pp.107–​27. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Woods, Angela. “Beyond the Wounded Storyteller.” Health, Illness and Disease, ed. Havi Carel and Rachel Cooper. Durham: Acumen, 2013, pp.113–​28.

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7 CONTEMPORARY HORROR AND DISABILITY Adaptations and active readers Petra Kuppers This chapter engages with disability-​focused writing with an emphasis on the recombinant pleasures of genre –​what working in a genre framework can mean, can add, and can subvert –​ stepping outside the box and examining what is in it. The argument will focus less on well-​ rehearsed arguments about the conservatism of horror’s examination and fear of otherness, or of Gothic returns of repressed fears. Instead this chapter investigates how contemporary horror texts adapt and play with old stereotypes of disability (as well as colonialism, race, and gender), in experimental ways. Science Fiction/​ fantasy/​ horror can do that kind of disorientating shifting with anything:  politics, culture, race, power, sex, sexuality, gender. That’s the stuff I  find interesting. It’s in the nature of the genre to allow one to step outside the box and examine what’s in it and think about what might be excluded and why. Any literature can do that; it’s just a particular hallmark of fantastical literature.  –​Nalo Hopkinson, 2005. (quoted in Simpson 96) Many disabled people write horror, although few are systematically collected under that category. While there are anthologies of disabled people writing science fiction (see Allan and al-​Ayad), the even more specialized niche of horror holds no such collection at this point. Personally, I  see disabled horror, fantasy, and sci-​fi writers regularly at national conventions (as I am one of these writers). My anecdotal experience and fieldwork suggests that a good percentage of genre writers are disabled or speak about disability experiences when they discuss their working methods, many more than at literary-​focused events. In 2018, for example, WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention held annually in Madison, Wisconsin, had at least four panels dedicated to facets of disability, a much larger percentage of this small convention than the equivalent figures at AWP, the Associated Writing Program’s conference, the main literary creative writing event in the US. So while disabled people most certainly write and read horror, there is at this moment no substantive body of work that focuses on what the literary genre of horror does for, with, and about disability.1 Classic horror has created disability stereotypes that the disability culture movement pushes against: from the film Psycho (1960) to the various productions of Frankenstein 82

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(initial book 1818, the first movie 1931), from evil wheelchair users to poor innocent blind victims. Kathryn Allan sums up what a core mode of disability studies’ engagement with genre writing has been: to catalogue the use of disability as a characterization or a narrative device. She argues that: When people with disabilities are turned into props and tropes (or left out completely) in narratives of a collective human future, it is imperative that SF scholars begin to call out –​as we do for instances of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia –​outdated, humiliating, and harmful images of disability. This chapter acknowledges the importance of monitoring the social progress of genre material, but its theoretical focus lies with the progressive and interesting contemporary uses of disability in horror. This chapter focuses on the kind of genre work that kicks Nalo Hopkinson’s box down and wheels over it. If the science fiction genre is concerned with futurities, horror pleasures rely on intensity and stimulation. To parse out who is actually alive at the end of a horror genre product might not always be the best guide to that intensity. I focus less on horror’s narrative plotting of disability, and more on the accumulation of sense and thrill at the site of disability plot points. In particular, this chapter investigates adaptations in horror genre spaces:  repetitions with a difference, surface play with plot elements that engage with or overshadow the deep psychology of realist writing. Adaptation is central to cultural pleasures: books, dramatic texts, films, often take up earlier storylines and play with them, twist them, subvert them, or add to them. So in the texts I am looking at in this chapter, older discursive structures become fodder for new meanings: monsters, asylums, lesbian vampires, and Victorian transgressive sexualities enter into play. I am interested in aspects of genre writing  –​communal writing, writing-​on, play with topoi –​the kind of textual productions that restructure and reinvent familiar themes and topics. With this, my argument aligns with theorized notions of disability as it appears in dis/​connects, missed translations, and trajectories of precarity, not in essential, “authentic” disabled experience grounded in realistic representation. My argument points to the value of non-​realist embodiment and enmindment (two terms that point to the process-​based and interactive character of how we come to feel ourselves as bodies and as minds). In the horror genre, states of difference can exceed or subvert what is known and “realistic” about disability and its boxes. Horror, with its visceral appeal to affect and sensation, is a fruitful basis from which to engage in a seduction toward non-​realist othernesses as intriguing and enriching ways of being in (this or other) worlds. This chapter is also part of a long lineage of thinking about genre and commerce within writerly production. Following in a line of argument from Northrop Frye to Michel Foucault, copyright scholar Mark Rose observes, “authors do not really create in any literal sense, but rather produce texts through complex processes of adaptation and transformation” (8). Within Roland Barthes’s framework of dispersed literary agency, the reader is the assemblage point where multiple cultural influences coalesce: The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. (148) This chapter analyzes several key examples in detail, including a shadow puppet show at the Dreamland Theater,Victor LaValle’s The Devil in Silver (2012), Cherie Priest’s Maplecroft (2014), 83

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and Matthea Harvey and Ann Jean Porter’s Of Lamb (2011), to argue that writers and readers consciously employ hybridity and reinvention in order to engage in genre play. As part of this, authors and readers can co-​create commentary on histories of exclusion, on agentic reclaiming of violent, racist, ableist, misogynist, and homophobic material, adapting them to new ends.

Cthulhu and Crip Time: Dreamland Theater:  “The Language of Time” (2017) On First Fridays, my small home city of Ypsilanti, Michigan, shares community music, galleries, and shows in the downtown area. In July 2017, one of these shows was a partnership between our small experimental puppet theater, the Dreamland Theater, and the Full Circle Community Center, a local drop-​in center for people living with mental illness. For this show, interviewers for the project had visited with Full Circle and collected people’s stories to reshape them as puppet sketches. The puppeteer organizers described their project’s intention as raising awareness of a community that is often ostracized due to social stigma. “The Language of Time” was the most surreal and experimental piece of the evening, mixing the puppeteer’s aesthetic of Cthulhu-​like monsters with a crip time narrative of nonlinear sensory immediacy. Cthulhu is a cosmic monster created by writer H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a racist and misogynist, and it shows loud and clear in his writings. So why do his figures get recycled and adapted so much? Cthulhu first appeared in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” published in the American pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. He is part of a strange cosmology, usually referred to as Mythos, in which ancient alien gods bring interdimensional madness to Earth: humans are strangely drawn to this way out of human words, but go mad when they open up portals for Cthulhu. Ever since Lovecraft first wrote about the entity, authors and artists from Stephen King to Guillermo del Toro have taken up Mythos ­figures –​something about this particular flavor of speculative nonhuman otherness has proven remarkably seductive over the years, and so seems the act of writing-​on, of co-​creating a mythological universe across time. In Lovecraftian words, madness is not redemptive or offers new insights into the here and now. Cosmic madness is not the same as the romantic “madness as seer” topos so often employed in fiction. And yet, Cthulhu madness is a form of escape, a response to the sudden opening of confining reality toward something else. We are in a world of overwhelming dimensions, fever or drug dreams, grandiose and colorful, swirling and moving at light speed. Whatever Lovecraft thought he was doing in creating these monsters, he offered up a smorgasbord of delights to contemporary writers, who gladly enter into the supposedly abject spaces of Cthulhu’s minions: “the others,” i.e. immigrants, racialialized others, the poor. These openings into established (racist, sexist, homophobic, abelist, classist) reality are the most seductive pull of the Lovecraftian universe. Crip Time is a phenomenon out of disability culture. It emerged as a communally used term in line with many other non-​modernist, nonwhite, not-​center forms of temporality. In the particular lineage I cite when tracking down a print-​origin, I attribute the term to Anne McDonald, a non-​speaking disabled woman who used facilitated communication to get out of a nursing home in the 1980s, eventually earn a degree, and become a leading part of the Australian disability culture scene. She writes about Crip Time: I live life in slow motion. The world I live in is one where my thoughts are as quick as anyone’s, my movements are weak and erratic, and my talk is slower than a snail in quicksand. I have cerebral palsy, I can’t walk or talk, I use an alphabet board, and I communicate at the rate of 450 words an hour compared to your 150 words in a 84

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minute –​twenty times as slow. A slow world would be my heaven. I am forced to live in your world, a fast hard one. If slow rays flew from me I would be able to live in this world. I need to speed up, or you need to slow down. Crip Time has become a generative principle for many who think about nonnormative temporalities, to the point where the term has taken off from its grounding in a particular woman’s disabled specificity and enforced incarceration toward much more generalized theorizations. This chapter’s engagement with horror and disability shifts the emphasis back onto the horizon of institutionalization, and the specifics and non-​general ways of being that we as disabled people bring to the world, yet without claiming authenticity, truth in individual storytelling. One of the reasons why Crip Time has become so resonant for so many writers in disability studies is its seductiveness: almost anybody in disability worlds can experience something of the slowing or morphing of time in pain, exclusion, or isolation. To have a term for this shifting, this difference from the norm, is a beautiful, unifying, community-​building mechanism. Anne McDonald was originally institutionalized, dehumanized, in a deeply abject place of being denied agency. There’s echo and communal memory, beyond individual lives and their specificity. There’s a near mythic group identity available here, when the consensus world (and, for instance, its regularized worktime regime) grates against disabled ways of being. So using Crip Time as a genre convention makes sense: it holds deep resonance, and yet can be adapted in multiple ways. The nexus of speculative horror worlding and Crip Time’s phenomenal perception allows for a way to theorize this opening into impersonal embodiment and enmindment. Back to the puppet show. The guarantor for communication in “The Language of Time” is not personal realist autobiography, told by an authentic or authorized individual. Instead, the guarantor for communication is genre play: the familiarity of tropes that connect to other tropes, such as Cthulhu-​informed imagery, the set-​pieces of “being oppressed in the classroom,” “spaceship imagery,” or “dragon stories.” These are all genre conventions, and the storytelling puppeteer group transformed the highly individual and idiosyncratic story of the Full Circle user into an amalgamation of unknowability and recognizability. Without “telling too much,” there was access. In this context, genre operates as a mixing of familiar and new elements. Although I  visited with the Full Circle Community Center, I  did not meet the woman whose narrative was shared here. But community members described her as someone with traumatic brain injury, telling a dense story of ant poison, falling down stairs, potential parental abuse, exclusionary experiences at school, and frightening encounters with doctors. Many of these story elements emerged in the mainly wordless show. Animal/​human/​monsters appeared on the backlit screen. A  dragon/​snake entered, intentions unclear, but large, detailed, beautiful, with cut-​outs and intricate framing: a rest for the eye, rather than a narrative motor. In another moment, the small multiple-​eyed heroine was lost in a puzzle piece forest, something that to members of disability culture can read like a comment on Autism Speaks iconography of missing puzzle pieces, presenting autistics as damaged people. Here, instead, the heroine’s shadow puppet was caught in normative puzzle worlds, walking through the forest without a fit, imprisoned by puzzle pieces. But mobility returned, in the shape of flying pigs with translucent ears/​wings. They accompanied the emergence of Cthuthlu: a big-​headed creature with multiple eyes and octopus tentacles, quite recognizable to genre-​fans of Lovecraftian horror. Escape was at hand: the pigs and the heroine run into a flying saucer spaceship, and take off. Patrick Elkins, the puppeteer, described his experiences working with the woman’s narrative to me: how he first heard the interview about her life, and how he was captured by the sense 85

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of time developed here, out of normal time frames. He didn’t use the term “Crip Time,” but when I offered it, he found the concept a fitting one: traumatic brain injury and mental health difference as a different form of living in time, telling stories, sharing circles and lines. He also told me that he met the drop-​in user later, and that she had seen his adaptation of her story, and enjoyed the silhouette narration. When I watched “The Language of Time,” I did not see a woman’s authentic experience, narrated in realist terms, then transformed more or less faithfully into shadow puppets, then received by me with my mind full of Cthulhu and Crip Time. The puppets left authentic grounding behind, but without denying the pain of institution. Coherences emerged, an escape narrative, a trajectory away from the certainties of this world. There might be a starship. There might be pig helpers. This is the delicious narrative I choose to take away from this show, and from this particular engagement of puppetry horror with disability. Cthulhu is well up for crip reclamation. In the weft spun by the Dreamland Theater’s engagement with non-​realist embodiment and enmindment, horror adaptations offered disability an open field of associations, not just the often depressing realities. The puppetry show’s adaptation of familiar motives, from Cthulhu and flying pigs to puzzle pieces, allowed for a sense of a woman’s lived experience, without the constraints of realism, linear storytelling, or empathetic identification.

New entrances into the asylum: Victor LaValle’s The Devil in Silver (2012) My next example of horror and disability shifts from life-​writing discourses of authenticity, surrealist engagements, and impersonal embodiment to the remediation of a particular topos of horror literature: the asylum or the psychiatric institution. In this example of genre manipulation, African-​American author Victor Lavalle creates literary fiction that is consciously aware of its meta play with language and convention. In the novella The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), LaValle takes one of Lovecraft’s most overtly racist stories, The Horror of Red Hook (1927), and transposes it, reversing the gaze. Where Lovecraft had Harlem as the site of horror and black/​foreign threat, with white Brooklyn and Chelsea as the threatened centers, now an African-​American narrator and musician tells of the racist and dangerous world he encounters once he leaves his home in Harlem in the 1920s –​ white people, and white police in particular, are the violent and unpredictable enemy, not the madness-​inducing thing on the threshold, the Mythos creature. This kind of imposition and mirroring of space also occurs in LaValle’s asylum novel, The Devil in Silver (2012), where police violence is also at work. We first encounter the protagonist of the novel on a threshold, in the moment of entrance. Pepper, the white working-​class protagonist, is becoming a mental patient, delivered by police to an inscrutable maze, an asylum. At the entrance to the asylum, status shifts: Pepper goes from being someone with rights, a key, access to YouTube and phones to someone drugged, labeled, whose every utterance becomes a symptom. The staff change, too as they work in the hospital –​no one escapes the inhumane regime of the institution. Over the course of the novel, the dangers of neglect and institutional violence are at least as real as the story’s monster. Adaptation and recycling of narratives are central to the novel’s form and audience address. In disability scholar Michelle Jarman’s engagement with the novel, she excavates a haunting encoded in numerical patterns. She describes a particular scene from LaValle’s text in which police storm the asylum which is, at that moment, in violent upheaval, and end up shooting Kofi, a Guinean immigrant: “The rest (of the police officers) fired on the crazed man. Then the cops fired forty-​one shots. The assailant was hit nineteen times” (210). Jarman argues that: 86

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The specific details, forty-​one shots, hit nineteen times, directly reference the infamous police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African man who was gunned down in the doorway of his Bronx apartment in 1999. (166) Jarman’s link to this murder provides a ghostly, haunted terrain (what she calls “reanimation,” staying firmly in the territory of the horror genre). This terrain marks racialized (police) violence’s deep time strata as an undercurrent of New Hyde, the asylum of the story. Jarman analyzes this coded genre-​play through a lens of alliances and recognition of parallels: LaValle’s reanimation of Diallo’s shooting implies that the coercive, violent logics, so easily concealed in the confines of the locked ward, are mirrored and active on the street. …Pepper realizes anyone in the asylum could be produced as demonic. This realization reorients him toward the other inmates, not through identification but crip affiliation. (167) This reorientation, Jarman argues, presents the white narrator of the novel with an opportunity to unlearn his white masculinity, and to find his way to “relational resistance,” in allegiance and friendship with other inmates, even in the absence of identification. Building on Jarman’s insight, I want to engage with another aspect of the novel’s play with horror conventions: the use of an unreliable narrator, and its effects on authentic representation and narrative trust. LaValle’s novel presents readers with unreliable narrators, with undecidable states of consciousness. To use the parlance of a classic novel set in an asylum, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), here the “chronics” are engaged in storytelling, not the voluntary admittances. Everybody with narrative weight in LaValle’s story is on the closed ward against their will, under observation, drugged, in restraint, under lock and key. Pepper, a thirty-​something white working-​class character, is the main focal point of the third-​person narrative. As he finds out, all stories are shaped by differences between internal and external worlds, and his own way of seeing himself becomes fragile, unreliable. Stilled by Haldol and lithium, hazed and eventually physically restrained, he lives in an involuntary holding pattern. In this set of forces, he finds a way of finding a place for himself, in between entrances and exits, in between walls and staircases, on the other side of locks. LaValle employs the genre conventions of gothic asylum novels, making it unclear who is “mad” and who is not. Adapting these conventions, LaValle shifts the moments of intensity from horror gore and angsty revalations of the relative madness status of actors. Instead, he offers readers a social field of and feel for the “relational resistances” Jarman discusses: while the relative in/​sanity status of all involved is unclear, the protagonist reaches out and makes temporary, context-​specific allegiances. Characters operate in obscurity but with agency. At first, readers may be inclined to trust Pepper’s self-​narration too much, and assume that the presence of a character who was “normal,” or a “normate,” in a mental health institution was a police error. But on further examination, it becomes clear that all characters in this novel are touched by a profound and complex self-​knowledge. Pepper shifts, he becomes more interesting as he becomes less reliable. Readers find out that his ex-​g irlfriend did not see him as the kind benefactor and guardian he perceived himself to be: he might well be a bully, violently erupting too quickly. Following the labyrinth of the asylum’s maze to its heart, readers encounter a stairwell with dismantled stairs, an austerity-​diminished forgotten prison, in which the Devil dwells: either a neglected son, a Bison-​headed mythical creature, or a killer. The Devil in Silver is a horror story with werewolf elements, but the locus of real cruelty is somewhere between the Kafkaesque machine of governmental neglect and the everyday dismissal of humanity that characterizes 87

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institutionalized mindsets. Madness, per se, is not the threat, and, with access to appropriate medication and regimes, people diagnosed with various kinds of mental health difference can be seen to flourish. One of the inmates, Xiu, or “Sue,” a Chinese woman brought into the asylum due to immigration policing and a lack of access to the lithium that she requires, miraculously finds access to the outside. She is reunited with her sister, with help, love, a regulated life, and access to her medication. So she thrives. Balance is possible. Likewise, a second character, Looshia, a young black woman, finds her way out, against all odds and against realist conventions: who needs them? Certainly not characters in revolt against racist and ableist conventions. Genre narratives can open up new escape paths, and new allegiances between characters. Literary resources are key to helping disability culture members be connected to an inhospitable world, but even though I teach the topic often, I have found few literary texts that use speculative means to approach the asylum as anything but a site of horror and constriction. While LaValle’s text offers these tropes, as well as well-​rehearsed spatial narratives of the asylum as a place of hiding holes, gothic parallel worlds, and architectural secrets, he also offers respect and friendship for mad people –​they are not the foil for his narrative, but the agents of change and shifting thresholds. The conventions of mad house narratives and the employment of unreliable narrators make identification complicated and challenging. That undecidability is the core pleasure of the book’s audience address and engagement of disability. In The Devil in Silver, literary engagement with the crafts of viewpoint creates a new perspective on the horror site of the asylum.

Horror hackery: Cherie Priest’s Maplecroft (2014) The next example of horror and disability engages with the mainstream of genre fiction, outside the self-​conscious literary realm. Here readers can find the lesbian, and the crip, all steamy in a fast and furious narrative push that sustains itself over multiple books, a common feature of genre literature. In my argument here, I want to bring out how different textual consumption patterns can offer openings for disabled (and queer) readers, for the kind of active reading strategies that have been at the heart of feminist engagement with literature, claiming ground by reading for pleasure and survival, even in compromised patriarchal frameworks of production and consumption. In Maplecroft:  The Borden Dispatches #1 (2014) US novelist Cherie Priest remediates a celebrated murder case, Lizzie Borden and her murdered family in 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts. The murder site is not far from Lovecraft’s Rhode Island, and many Lovecraftian elements appear in Priest’s novel, like morphing land/​sea creatures and “unnatural desires.” Interest in the historical figure of Borden as potential axe murderer has never really abated, and even during the time of my construction of this essay, an internet meme based on her circulated in my social media world. The meme from July 2017 presents a black square with white letters, spelling out:  “Do not accept a request from Lizzie Borden. You will get hacked” (I cannot trace an origin point: that’s the point of memes). This meme plays on the multiple meanings of hacking: hacking with an axe, and the internet-​related practice of hacking into an account, taking it over. As a meme, this Lizzie Borden tile plays into the trope of violence and personal erasure in the ambivalent encounter-​space of social media. These tropes, violence and (gendered) erasure, are also at work in Priest’s novel, taking over an old murder story. In the Priest novel, we read this delicate description of Lizzie Borden’s sensorium, her perspective on tiny gills, knife slits, bodily openings, very differently coded from “hacked to pieces.” These openings are on the white neck of a lesbian adventuress actress, lover of Lizzie Borden: 88

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“What was that…?” I  asked quietly, holding her chin aside, stretching her neck. There: a small slit of skin, fluttering. As light as if it’d been cut with a razor, a tiny fillet of flesh that wrinkled when I touched it. I felt the two more horizontal flaps before I saw them. That made three altogether, with the start of a fourth, not quite as long. …All of them sucked shut against her throat, lying so flat that if I hadn’t known they were present, I would’ve never noticed them. I tried to touch them again, but felt almost nothing.The faint texture of paper cuts, or maybe the delicate, almost-​not-​ even-​there-​ness of a small fish’s fins. (Priest 315) Queerness and disability mix intriguingly in this post-​Lovecraftian pastiche. “Fillet of flesh” speak to consumption, to eating, certainly a possibility in this New England world in which fishing is a subsistence economy. “Razor” and “cut” –​the axe and what it stands for, mutilation and murder –​are not far away from this reference field, but they are coded differently, with a different kind of trans-​body status. The not-​quite-​there-​ness of the delicate touch chimes well with the status that lesbianism is afforded in this novel, set in 1895 –​the novel bosom-​heaves with references to loves that dare not say their name. Writing and seeing emerge as connecting techniques in multiple ways. There are various author figures in this mainly epistolary novel (echoing both Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s set-​up, and the structure of many Lovecraftian stories, where scientists record their findings in field notebooks). Not seeing things right in front of one’s face is a feature of this particular Victorian world. The secretive framework within which the two Borden sisters build their lives relies on leaving well enough alone, not touching tender stuff, keeping one’s self to one’s self. Their neighbor, Doctor Owen, once alerted to Lizzie’s lover, isn’t particularly scandalized by the lesbian love between Nance O’Neill and Lizzie Borden, but he is also highly aware of the invisible nature of their relationship, invisible by social need, and invisible also by self-​imposed emotional maintenance, the need for keeping it together. Emma, Lizzie’s disabled sister, has to vie with Nance for Lizzie’s time and affection, and has little patience for their erotic shenanigans. Emma is also leading a gender-​related double life: although highly consumptive and near dead with coughing fits and fatigue (all very sensuously described, full of Crip Time moments), she finds a sphere of influence for herself. She has taken on a male persona, Dr. E. A. Jackson, and, as this male authority, authors marine-​biology texts and corresponds with men from all kinds of universities.This cross-​gendered traffic in knowledge eventually brings destruction to the women’s household, though –​the tenderness of in-​between stages, from lesbian love to male impersonation, cannot withstand the blow of the axe. There is no happy ending here for tender bodies gasping for air.Words and descriptions accumulate at the crossing points, at open cauldrons (one full of acids in the cellar, one full of sex in the upstairs bedroom). Shape-​shifting also feeds the repeated description of the townspeople’s physical and mental “symptoms,” the novel’s nod to the rise of historico-​medical thrillers, laying out early experiments with tetanus viruses, a plot-​ point of the book. In the genre of the fantastic, this novel, like many of its Lovecraftian wayfarers, seems less interested in just boiling the story along, but in stringing together pearls of description, generic situations polished and shined with loving detail and sensuous wrapping. To sum up the story as “the crip gets no love and the lesbo dies,” while accurate, does not do justice to the novel’s shape, and the intensity of the tender set-​pieces. Pure narrative analysis does not always provide the right answer about emotional identification points and emphasis of a genre text’s universe. As a genre novel, this book offers plenty of opportunity for what literary critics used to call “escapism”  –​imagining (lesbian) romance or active (murderous) women, the thrill and forbidden pleasures of women’s romance consumption. Refiguring these consumptions into active 89

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reading strategies, and writers as collaborators in offering these gems of hacked pleasure, allows for a more nuanced investigation of the uses horror can be put to. When literary critic Janice Radway interviewed women about their romance reading practices in the 1980s, she opened up reader-​response territory to thinking about the active pleasures of women compensating for a lack of agency in their lives. But she was also suspicious of where this might lead: “the vicarious pleasure offered by romantic fiction finally may be satisfying enough to forestall the need for more substantial change in the reader’s life” (118).These issues directly impact disability and genre reading (and writing). In this analysis of Maplecroft, I offered a pathway through a fast-​moving popular culture book that traces my own reading pleasures, as a queer disabled active reader lingering over what she wants, in a woman-​authored text that quite explicitly offers entry points for these pleasures, fully aware of the formulaic connective dots of genre writing. Non-​realist forms of embodiment offer anchor points for those of us whose bodies and minds have been denigrated, put beyond the pleasure-​pale by mainstream representation. Horror and its intensities can provide rich ground for pleasure-​adaptation, as one does not have to figure out how these intense creatures make a life in the “real” world. We’ll just hack our way in.

Erasure pleasures: Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter’s Of Lamb (2011) To close my argument about horror’s capacious disability engagement through adaption, I’ll focus on a very different text, of a more experimental lineage. Of Lamb (2011), by Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter, uses erasure procedures on a historical text, A Portrait of Charles Lamb (1983) by Lord David Cecil, combining the resulting text with paintings to create a subtle experimental entry into the disability horror genre. Essayist Charles Lamb lived with his sister Mary, who murdered her mother and wounded her father in an unexplained attack in 1796. She was never prosecuted, but lived in an asylum before being reintroduced to Charles’s household. Charles himself also struggled with mental health difference, including alcoholism, as well as other disabilities, referenced as “a limp” and “stuttering” in various accounts. The two stayed connected throughout their lives, collaborated on successful children’s literary material in their own right, and socialized with famous literary figures, including Mary Shelley, the Wordsworths, and others. Poet Matthea Harvey uses Cecil’s twentieth-​century biography of Charles, with its frequent mentions of Mary and Lamb, and mashes the story with a well-​known nineteenth-​century nursery rhyme, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” by Sarah Josepha Hale, which tells the story of Mary Sawyer bringing her lamb to school. Visual artist Amy Jean Porter painted images to go with the single-​sentence pages, creating a psychedelic flowing surrealist landscape around a strange lamb: not a cuddly fluffy one, but one that looks wise and haunted. The graphic novel proceeds by building elaborate composite images. Plants twine around Mary, the only named human depicted, and Lamb, a sheep more than a symbol of either innocence or suffering (in the Christian tradition). Lamb is not really cute –​the animal has a facial structure more akin to an adult sheep.The two figures develop their close relationship, full of sexual innuendo and pubescent longings, with Victorian imagery of excess and shrouding: “They pin’d and hungr’d after bod-​ily joy,” reads one entry from this unpaginated book, with a heart of white hedge-​roses framing a male and female putty (prepubescent nudes with blond curly hair). At the bottom of the image, much smaller, is Mary, in trousers, arms behind her back, and Lamb, looking curious for what is to come. Multiple genre memories are referenced in this image: from size-​shifting Alice in Wonderland (1865) to references of flocked wallpaper and its associations with repressed femininity. The 90

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book shares territory with the sexualized graphic scenes of Lost Girls, an iconic graphic novel (initial chapters were released in 1991, with the text acquiring cult status and various editions in the 1990s and 2000s). In Lost Girls, writer Alan Moore and illustrator Melinda Gebbie remediate Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan (1904), and The Wizard of Oz (1900), depicting scenes in which the heroines meet to discuss their sexual lives and sexual abuse narratives. In Of Lamb, the page that faces the dancing putty figures has only an abstract graphic background with the words “Who would not be curious to see the pictures?” written above it. Bestial conjoinments, potential incestuous longing (between brother and sister, Charles and Mary) and cross-​species sexuality have no visual equivalent in the pages.This page functions like a bedroom curtain, a common visual device in early cinema, drawing the curtains on the just married couple. On the next page, the words “Mary and Lamb inter-​-​twined” are transected by the legs of the upright standing Lamb. On his back rides Mary, a long strand of material in their respective mouths. The two strands, or twine, or ribbons, write out “Mary” and “Lamb” above them, woven through each other (potentially referencing Mary Lamb’s sowing business, or handfastening symbols of ribbons wrapped around the partners). The Lamb’s blue ear frames one half of Mary’s face, and her legs are blue, the color of Lamb’s fleece, while the blush on Mary’s cheeks is visually repeated on Lamb’s ears. The two creatures merge visually, and in their linguistic representation. After this uncanny mélange of erotic allusion and animal/​human imagery, Lamb’s story becomes darker, and the story that emerges speaks of pubescent angst about becoming an adult, about anxieties about ego boundaries, and latent violence emerging.Various interpretations are possible, given the nonlinear form of narration. Thus, the sentences on various pages read, “For Lamb, white-​faced, fettered, time was full of time.” “Lamb imagined the story of a lamb made human.” “He was, to use his own phrase, half a man.” “A quarrel began the trouble.” “Lamb, eyes shut, ran backwards.” And “His anxiety/​a glittering chandelier/​rusting in his mind.” This deterioration of happiness and togetherness stretches over multiple pages, aligned with winter nature imagery, and crescendos with a leave-​taking. Images of transport (airplanes, coffins sailing on water, rushing water, a carpet flowing down a staircase) prefigure separation. Seasons, the thorns of prickly plants, the silhouette of a dinosaur: images and poetry alike capture psychic shifts, and overwhelm the reader with an excess of imagery. The murder and the asylum (as both Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb were hospitalized for mental health reasons) are only obliquely referenced in these pages, even more shrouded than the fantastical human/​ animal intercourse. There are references to “six weeks/​in a madhouse.” Also, “I bit/​my shadow/​ and Mary.” And:  “Haunted Lamb/​sung out/​shut the door, /​allow me to see/​organs once more.” Later, in the description of Lamb’s reacquaintance with society, the book presents two praying mantises, uncannily eating a winged creature between them, with the words “Face-​to-​ face/​they ate” above, surrounded by a frame of yellow pears on tree branches. In the last section of the book, the narrative shifts to Mary’s madness, or nervous breakdown, and the images in this section are less nature-​focused, and reference more urban (London) environments, with various architectural creations, gridded windows, and gothic churches dominating the visuals. The terror of uncanny eating appears again: “Should I tell you/​I watched her eating/​a bit of cold mutton/​in our kitchen?” Lamb and Mary are separated here by a window, a yellow outdoors looking in on a cooler, blue interior, with a skirted piano shape squashing Mary, who is eating a pink “lamb-​on-​a-​stick,” like an ice-​lolly. Mergings, anxieties, and violence all shape the different separation madnesses of Lamb and Mary. The actual killings are not directly referenced; instead, readers witness two creatures who are different holding each other as they pass through transformation and depression. Remediation shapes the book’s materiality, in particular in the act of erasure. Harvey blanks out 91

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many of the biography’s sentences to leave a handful of words per page, and then arranges them in careful composition with the graphic offerings. This materiality of storytelling excavates what is unspoken, and points to the historical narrative that consists of cutting in very different ways. Every word of the original biography, a historical glimpse into an actual historical figure, is carefully hand-​crafted, either erased or saved, and the poet rearranges, makes new, or covers up. The act of creation is a palimpsest: it both denies and makes visible the erasures of history, the invisibility of mad people, the constrained lives of women, the invisibility of murder victims outsides their murderers’ narratives, and the asylum as a cut-​out from society. Adaptation here becomes an act of eating up, chewing, and changing. The horror/​pleasure of Of Lamb is in its surrealist uncovering of violence, and its play with juxtaposition. Readers become implicated in peering behind curtains, becoming active tracers of connections and alluded reference fields.

Conclusion In these pages, horror and writing engage at sites of disability, exposing curious and unfamiliar shapes, combining old stereotypes and tropes into alignments that show the labor of creative practice. The resulting readings do not offer psychological realism, or a claim to authenticity grounded in an identity politics. Instead, a genre-​based recombinant logic of hide and seek is at play. My local Ypsilanti puppetry show used adaptation to allow an unclear/​unknowable life narration to emerge in associations and surrealist imagery.Victor LaValle’s take on the asylum-​ adapted conventions around madness and unreliable narrators shows how allegiances can be made even in the absence of firm handles on other people. Priest’s lesbian crip scenes offered ways of feeling one’s self sensually into remediated Lovecraftian nonhumans. Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter worked together to deconstruct existing texts, adapting them into non-​ narrative collages of horror tropes grounded in actual lives. Both Priest’s popular novel and Of Lamb’s experimental text emerge from historical events, but their respective effects are very different: adaptations here have different horror ends, one more aligned with the genre-​ reader’s pleasure seeking, one with an active reader’s excavation of uncanny openings and border crossings. In all cases, the reader is the site of assembly: intensities emerge where reading desires and textual offerings intersect. Horror is an intensification machine, not only a narrative path. All of the disparate texts I  survey here align on this point:  real lived disability as a secure and shared storyline is emphatically not the point of the story. Instead, and deliciously, disability becomes a place where violence and agencies can try out new forms of interplay, with death, sex, and flying pigs along the way.

Note 1 For some work on other genres, see, for science fiction, the authors collected in Allan, 2013, or Schalk, 2018, for work on romance fiction, Cheyne, 2013. Existing engagement with horror and disability tends to focus on films, see for instance Hall, 2016, on Edward Scissorhands, or Angela Smith, 2012, on 1930s horror films.

Works cited Allan, Kathryn (ed.). Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Unpaginated e-​book. Allan, Kathryn, and Djibril al-​Ayad. Accessing the Future. Futurefire.net Publishing, 2015.

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Contemporary horror and disability Barthes, Roland. “Death of the Author,” in Image-​Music-​Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978, pp. 142–​147. Cheyne, Ria. “Disability Studies Reads the Romance.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol.7, no.1 (2013), pp. 37–​52. Hall, Melinda. “Horrible Heroes: Liberating Alternative Visions of Disability in Horror.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 6, no.1, 2016, e-​publication. Harvey, Matthea, and Amy Jean Porter. Of Lamb. New York: McSweeney Books, 2011. Unpaginated. Jarman, Michelle. “Race and Disability in US Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Disability and Literature. Eds. Clare Barker and Stuart Murray. Cambridge and New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 155–​169. LaValle,Victor. The Devil in Silver. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2012. —​—​—​. The Ballad of Black Tom. New York: Tor, 2016. McDonald, Anne. “Crip Time.” Anne McDonald Centre, www.annemcdonaldcentre.org.au/​crip-​time. Accessed April 2018. Priest, Cherie. Maplecroft: The Borden Dispatches #1. New York: ROC/​Penguin, 2014. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,  1993. Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined:  (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Simpson, Hyacinth M. “Fantastic Alternatives: Journeys into the Imagination: A Conversation with Nalo Hopkinson.” Journal of West Indian Literature, vol.14, 2005, pp. 96–​112. Smith, Angela. Horror Progeny:  Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2012.

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PART II

Novels and short stories

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8 FROM “CHANGELINGS” TO “LIBTARDS” Intellectual disability in the eighteenth century and beyond D. Christopher Gabbard The word “idiot” serves a powerful rhetorical function. This is the term we must use when speaking about a person with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in the long eighteenth century, although it is an imperfect fit. It circulates today as a ubiquitous slur, one that is considered socially acceptable in many quarters. Calling someone an “idiot” (or a synonym) frequently serves the triple purposes of silencing, delegitimizing, and dehumanizing. To insult someone’s intelligence in this way is “to go for the jugular” because most of us think of ourselves as being smart. Ridicule regarding a lack of cognitive fitness is particularly potent in the political sphere. In the United States, some conservatives refer to progressives as “libtards” –​a portmanteau word obviously combining “liberal” and “retard.” On the other side, the left-​leaning and widely syndicated cartoonist Rall followed the 2004 re-​election of George W. Bush with a strip lampooning him and his conservative supporters as delayed learners. Polemical invective of this sort implicitly calls upon opponents to return to private life and shut up because their poor mental function disqualifies them from participating in public affairs. Ad hominem political attack citing low intelligence, while certainly an old practice, is one that gained traction at a particular point in history, and that point is roughly the time of the philosopher John Locke. During the final decades of the seventeenth century, “changeling” was a term carrying connotations roughly akin to “idiot,”1 and, according to social historian C. F. Goodey, Locke himself partook in this rhetorical practice, often leaving “his reader to infer [that his] conservative [Tory] opponents too are changelings” (324). Prior to Locke, the term “idiot” was not as intensely pejorative as it would become. Calling someone an idiot carried less sting; condemning someone for cowardice, dishonor, or damnation wounded more deeply. This was so because, in matters of early modern identity, possessing intelligence mattered less than having honor or a prospect of an afterlife in heaven. To trace how “idiot” developed into a harshly uncomplimentary expression, this chapter will explore two interrelated developments, the rise of the intelligence society and the progression of secular demonization as a socially acceptable response to the cognitively “other.” A number of literary texts in the long eighteenth century both fashioned and reflected these developments, and in this regard the current chapter will examine aspects of William Wycherley’s comedy The Country Wife (1675); Daniel Defoe’s treatise on Peter the Wild Boy, Mere Nature Delineated (1726); and Frances Burney’s novel Camilla (1796). This chapter also will look at two texts that called these interrelated developments into

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question, Anne Finch’s poem “The Introduction” (1713) and Jonathan Swift’s satire Gulliver’s Travels (1726/​35).

Status idiocy and functional idiocy Critical disability studies challenges us to uncover what was at stake with regard to the concept of idiocy and to identify the purposes it served in the cultural imagination. At one time the words “idiocy” and “idiot” together were associated with two distinct categories of meaning, both of which entered the English language at the beginning of the fifteenth century, although each had a separate prehistory going back to ancient times. Looking in the Oxford English Dictionary, we find that the first sense of “idiocy” has to do with status and is one no longer in use, having fallen out of circulation by the nineteenth century.This signification involves social status: an idiot according to this definition was determined to be so by his or her place in society. An idiot according to this meaning would be a private person who was unskilled, uneducated, and/​or unsophisticated and whose mental shortcoming would be understood as ignorance (“Idiot” n.1., a, b, & c). This understanding of the term had its roots in ancient Greek, with the original term designating a private citizen as opposed to a public official. In Latin, “idiota” took on the meanings of “uneducated,” “ignorant,” and “common” (“idiota”). A vestige of this first sense of “idiot” remains in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606): the titular character speaks of “a tale /​Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /​ Signifying nothing” (5.5.29–​31).The “idiot” here refers to a person lacking professional training or skill, perhaps an apprentice actor (Jarrett and Goodey 123). When Samuel Johnson in his 1755 Dictionary defined “idiocy” simply as a “want of understanding,” he was invoking this first denotation. “Idiot” and “idiocy” were often used to speak about unskilled workers, landless laborers, laymen, and servants. Status idiocy carried with it the late medieval idea that the broad population of illiterate and poor constituted an idiotic mass (Jarrett and Goodey 127). The laboring poor of the countryside were often described in this way, a meaning that Marx and Engels perpetuate in their phrase “the idiocy of rural life” (Tucker 477). The second sense of “idiocy” is functional idiocy, and the word still circulates with this meaning, although it is not considered acceptable. This has to do with a hopeless and profound inability to navigate the world due to mental processing flaws, an inherent constitutional inability to carry out basic life-​supporting activities (“Idiot” n.2., a & b). This sense has roots in the jurisprudence of the Middle Ages: G. E. Berrios writes that, in medieval court records, this sort of idiocy was “associated with qualifiers such as congenital and irreversible” and concerned fitness to inherit property (226).2 While it is true that this sense conveyed an abject air, confusion swirled around the condition for which it stood. At the start of the long eighteenth century, functional idiocy was not infrequently attributed to individuals living with impairments that today would not be associated with congenital or acquired poor intellectual processing. For example, Simon Jarrett and C. F. Goodey write that the “most extreme and enduring image of the [functional] idiot body and its incontinence was the gaping, driveling mouth” (128). A  “driveling mouth” actually indicates something different:  it has to do with the spasticity brought about by cerebral palsy, a condition not always accompanied by cognitive impairment. However, because cerebral palsy itself would not be named and studied until the early 1800s, it was conflated in earlier times with functional idiocy. Similarly, those who were born blind or deaf were generally thought to be functional idiots, although with the spread of Enlightenment ideas these stereotypes underwent reexamination (Tunstall 79–​80; Lindgren 98–​102). A striking example of lumping an unrelated impairment together with functional idiocy is the case of Samuel Johnson, who apparently lived with Tourette syndrome, a condition not 98

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identified during his lifetime (Davis 55). Johnson’s initial biographer, James Boswell, records that the first time the painter William Hogarth met Johnson, in 1739, he saw a man “shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange, ridiculous manner,” and concluded that Johnson “was an ideot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. [Samuel] Richardson” (255). Hogarth’s opinion instantly changed, however; as soon as Johnson started speaking he “displayed such a power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this ideot had been at the moment inspired” (255). When Hogarth observed Johnson for the first time and took him to be an “ideot,” the former mistook the latter’s Tourette syndrome to be an abject form of idiocy. While Johnson –​as well as the blind, deaf, and spastic –​over time would be cleared of the automatic charge of functional idiocy, the charge itself would gain potency as an aspersion indicating extreme social worthlessness.

The intelligence society By the middle of the eighteenth century, idiocy in the sense of functionality was supplanting the meaning associated with status. It is one of the contentions of this chapter that Britain’s transformation from a feudal to an emerging capitalist economy promoted the currency of “idiot” and “idiocy” in the second sense.The impetus behind this though was more than just economic. The rise of the new economic order was interconnected with the advent of the public sphere, which itself was integral to a far reaching social and cultural development, the Enlightenment. A component of the Enlightenment was the ascendance of what Goodey calls the intelligence society. In A History of Intelligence (2011), Goodey maps out how, from the late medieval period to the late seventeenth century, the individual’s perceived possession of intelligence rose in social value vis-​à-​vis traditional status-​bidding claims such as those linked with honor and lineage (aristocratic noble birth) and with one’s state of grace –​the prospect of religious salvation (103–​ 24, 151–​78, 313–​46). Along with the slow but steady transition into modernity, intelligence began to matter more and more with regard to how power was distributed. Goodey does not use the word “meritocracy,” but it could be argued that the origins of the intelligence society served as the basis of democratic meritocracy, which is grounded in the ideology that the “best and the brightest” should rise to the top of society and make the major political decisions.While this transformation spanned beyond economic concerns, it strongly manifested itself in the world of commerce. The late seventeenth century was the period of emerging capitalism, and the growing bourgeoisie –​merchants, international traders, and stock jobbers –​were increasingly pointing to their own wealth acquisition as a sign of their superior intelligence. This definition of intelligence in effect allowed a larger pool of European males access to cultural (and literal) capital, but it was strategically developed to deny other people access to power. For the embryonic intelligence society to establish its raison d’être, it needed an “other” against which to define itself, and this “other” was the real or imagined cognitively deficient person: the idiot, changeling, simpleton, or natural fool. Goodey contends that our contemporary concept of intellectual and developmental disabilities began to take shape at precisely the same historical moment that intelligence as a mode of social status bidding was becoming evident; the two concepts –​intelligence and intellectual disability –​were “mutually reinforcing” (1). Intelligence, Goodey argues, cannot be accepted as an unequivocal social good without the existence of a presumed intellectually deficient other, with the latter serving as a foil illustrating the superior value of the former (1–​2). This mutual reinforcement provided a platform for “cognitive ableism,” which Licia Carlson defines as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of individuals who possess certain cognitive abilities (or the potential for them) against those who are believed not to actually or potentially possess them” (140). With the 99

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gradual restructuring of society in the direction of privileging intelligence, cognitive ableism became pervasive. Accompanying the elevation of the intelligence society were two questions: who was human? and who or what was an enemy of the human? The first question had to do with human identity: what made humans human? As Felicity Nussbaum observes of the long eighteenth century, “the emerging standards of what it means to be human…are increasingly articulated” (2). The late seventeenth century in particular was a period in which the notion that “the cognitive ability of our minds [a]‌s a defining quality of our species” was just becoming dominant (Martensen 144). In an era consumed by questions of the human, the idiot was viewed as marking a boundary in the cultural imagination between human and animal. The figure of the idiot was mobilized to demarcate the separation between a human “us” and a bestial “them.” The second sense of “idiot” –​functional idiocy –​as it developed and was utilized over time, additionally had to do with the repurposing of older methods of societal exclusion, of turning opponents and members of an outgroup into pariahs. Old demons were being switched for new ones. Belief in the devil was going out of fashion among the educated elite (Muchembled 4, 171; Goodey 268), and the target of scapegoating and demonizing began shifting, with a new victim replacing the old: the functional idiot. In pre-​modern times, a person or group would mark someone as a pariah by literally “demonizing” the individual, accusing the person of not being fully human because he or she was possessed –​the devil had inhabited his or her body. With the new order, those with diminished mental capacity were taken to be not fully human because intelligence was more and more being recognized as a defining feature of the human. Consequently, where once the accusation of devil possession had served religiously oriented people as cause for a person’s ostracism, a new form of expulsion started taking its place, which will be called here (for want of a better phrase) “secular demonizing.” With an emergent cognitive ableism informing this stigmatizing process, idiocy became “the master trope of human disqualification” (Mitchell and Snyder 3). In summary, as intelligence rose as a vehicle for social-​ status bidding, people who were considered to be mentally deficient found themselves relegated to the bottom of society. Such individuals were compared to brutes,“animals with human form” (La Mettrie 38).This has remained true into the present day: people with intellectual and developmental disabilities continue to be, in Martin Halliwell’s phrase, the “degree zero of humanity” (51), or, in Janet Lyon’s, “the lowest rung.” An early surfacing of the secular demonizing trope can be glimpsed in William Wycherley’s 1675 Restoration comedy The Country Wife. At the beginning of Act Two, Alithea and Sparkish, who are engaged, take part in a dialogue in which the former relays what Harcourt, who is also present in the scene, has said about Sparkish. According to Alithea’s report, Harcourt had earlier slandered Sparkish as “a senseless, driveling idiot” (2.1; 21). Because the audience recognizes that Sparkish is at worst an intellectually shallow man, Harcourt’s characterization seems excessive. If Harcourt had impugned the character of Sparkish to Alithea solely on the basis of her fiancé being a status idiot, that is, a man who was out of his league with regard to pursuing her and so should withdraw his affections, his message would have been sufficiently clear. He would have been telling Sparkish (indirectly through Alithea) that he should retire to a private sphere appropriate for a shallow-​minded man. His use of the word “idiot” would call to mind status idiocy. However, he chose not to stop at categorizing him as such, instead using the modifying adjective “driveling.” This overstates the case, placing Sparkish squarely in the class of functional idiots. Without doubt he employs the hyperbolic visual description of Sparkish as a drooling imbecile to besmirch his romantic rival, but this caricature raises an interesting question: why resort to such a heavy handed affront? Why must Sparkish’s idiocy be of the abject rather than the private kind? The answer has to do with the fact that The Country Wife is a comedy of 100

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wit (intelligence), and in it we witness in microcosm an intelligence society establishing the standards for who is to be included and excluded. In such a setting, a mocking gibe about a rival not having any intelligence whatsoever is the most cutting remark that can possibly be made. Harcourt intends to drive Sparkish off the stage in this comedy of intelligence by reducing him to the cognitively “other.” Harcourt’s choice of words illustrates the coming trend: as intelligence begins to vie with the traditional status-​bidding claims of lineage and salvation, accusations of mental incompetence (such as that made by Harcourt against Sparkish) come to serve the objective of ejecting targeted individuals (the Sparkishes of the world) from public space (in this case, from Alithea’s affections). This brief exchange in Act Two forces us to speculate that the first sense of “idiocy” (status) may have dropped out of circulation over time because the second sense of “idiocy” (function) subsumed it. Slowly but surely the second sense may have started to signify both private status and mental deficiency, with the suggestion being that cognitively impaired people should hide themselves in the private sphere:  they should not come out into the open and attempt to participate in public affairs. If this speculation has merit, we can read Harcourt’s vitriol as conveying the double-​barreled insinuation that the addressee of such a slight was cognitively deficient and that he should withdraw from public view. This implication of Harcourt’s word “driveling” comes fully into the open in John Locke’s 1689 An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Locke’s philosophy regarding how the mind works helped establish a normative standard of human mental ability, leaving anything falling below this standard to be construed as a diminishment of fully human status (Simplican 25–​46). As such, it is a text in which the secular demonizing of the cognitively “other” is particularly pronounced. In fact, Locke is the philosopher who poured accelerant on the idea of functional idiocy: he greatly contributed to turning “idiot” into a vehicle for nasty verbal abuse, doing so by frequently and derogatorily referencing the idiot’s close linguistic kin  –​the changeling. The changeling in Locke’s writing is a humanoid entity with an abysmally slow cognitive process:  the “drivelling,” unintelligent, intractable changeling exhibits “a defect in the mind” and so serves as the perfect illustration of functional idiocy at its nadir (4.4.16; 571–​72; emphasis added).3 In Locke’s view, the changeling is subhuman, and, as such, instantiates the cognitive “other,” an entity so low in standing that perhaps it ought to be obliterated ((3.6.27; 454–455) 454–​55). Paul de Man notes that the way Locke presents the changeling figure becomes “powerfully coercive since it generates…the ethical pressure of such questions as ‘to kill or not to kill’ ” (40). This is to say that Lockean rhetoric centering around changelings becomes so provocative that the question arises as to whether they should even be allowed to live. Locke himself implicitly recruits the changeling figure for his polemics, for he “leaves his reader to infer [that his] conservative opponents too are changelings” (Goodey 324).4

Daniel Defoe’s Mere Nature Delineated and Frances Burney’s Camilla Locke’s Essay greatly influenced Daniel Defoe, who produced a detailed description of a functional idiot in the 1726 treatise Mere Nature Delineated: Or, A Body without a Soul, a text in which he takes Peter the Wild Boy for his subject. In 1725, an illiterate and non-​speaking homeless boy found living in a German forest was brought on the king’s order to the London court. The incongruity of this supposedly wild youth in such a polite environment aroused curiosity, comment, speculation, and amusement. In fact,“Peter’s presence in England was, as one observer put it, ‘more remarkable than the discovery of Uranus’ ” (Candland 10–​11). Peter created a sensation because he was thought to be an exemplar of a wild child living in a “state of nature” –​a “natural man” found not overseas but in the heart of Europe. Seventy years later, Dr. Jean-​Marc 101

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Itard would become famous for his efforts to train Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a process that later came to be understood as a founding moment in the history of exceptional education. Peter, though, was an important precursor. His education was entrusted to the queen’s physician, Dr. John Arbuthnot (a member of the Scriblerus Club), who, in contrast to Itard, kept no notes. A half-​dozen tracts, mainly satires, soon appeared, and in the middle of 1726 Defoe published a book-​length assessment. Defoe “was unusual in taking the case seriously –​his contemporaries plainly regarded Peter as, first and foremost, a joke” (Newton 42–​43). Defoe spends most of the piece satirizing not Peter but various sectors of society, particularly the learned, who believed they saw in the boy an instance of a human being living in a state of nature. Defoe begins his examination by stating his doubt that a naked adolescent could survive a week in the bitterly cold German forests, and he ultimately determines that Peter was a functional idiot abandoned by his family. The boy’s failure to notice when he soiled his breeches indicated he was not the exemplar many believed him to be. Swift was particularly skeptical; after meeting Peter himself, he dryly observed, “I can hardly think him wild in the Sense they report him” (qtd. in Novak 139). After meeting with the boy on several occasions, Defoe came to believe that Peter would never be able to speak, and this factor made all the difference; in this he was following the spirit of the age. As James Berger observes, the “impulse in Locke, Condillac, and other Enlightenment thinkers –​quite evident in most philosophical responses to wild children and what today is known as IDD –​was to regard language and socialization as the primary, or even the sole, determinants in subjectivity” (33). Speaking coherent language was the surest sign in eighteenth-​century Enlightenment culture of full human status, and Peter, being nonverbal, fell short in this regard. Unlike Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest (1611), Peter could not so much as learn to curse. In Defoe’s estimation, he was at best a failed Friday, the native islander in the novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), who is taught to speak English (Calder 150–​52, 167). The title and subtitle Defoe selected for his 1726 treatise therefore are telling: Peter was “A Body without a Soul.” At best, he was “Mere Nature,” and these choices indicate an alteration from Defoe’s earlier thinking, for in his 1697 Essay on Projects he had rejected “the notion that ‘fools’ have no soul” (Stainton 24). But by 1726, his views had changed, perhaps under the influence of Locke’s Essay: while he pities the boy and argues that he should be treated humanely, he seems to have embraced a secular-​demonizing view of mental deficiency, concluding that Peter was a quasi-​human figure, not a full member of the human race. Locke’s influence as well as the tendency to engage in secular demonizing can also be detected in Frances Burney’s 1796 novel Camilla. The titular hero’s sister, Eugenia, is beloved by her family for her intelligence and sweetness. Through accident and illness her face and body have been disfigured and deformed, but because the family has concealed the extent of this aesthetic damage, she has remained unaware of this. When Eugenia eventually finds out, she falls into a depression. Attempting to see what “reason could urge” (310), her father takes her, in what amounts to a freak-​show presentation, to view the spectacle of a young woman, the Beautiful Idiot. Among other things, the Beautiful Idiot drools: “The slaver driveled unrestrained from her mouth, rendering utterly disgusting a chin that a statuary might have wished to model” (309). Eugenia quickly discerns that the young woman is miserable, one minute throwing herself to the ground and sobbing, the next rising and bursting “into a fit of loud, shrill, and discordant laughter” (307). She subsequently strikes “her head with both her hands, making a noise that resembled nothing human” (310). Afterward Eugenia says, “O, my father!… Did you lead me thither purposely to display to me her shocking imbecility?” (310). This scene featuring the Beautiful Idiot should be read in light of the work of the moral philosopher Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper). Writing many decades earlier, he 102

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contended that appealing exterior physical qualities may make an individual attractive but that appearance was not enough: intelligence also had to be present. Just when we think we are appreciating a person’s beauty, he argued, we are really admiring “a mysterious expression and a kind of shadow of something inward in the temper” (qtd. in Joshua 56). Following this understanding, people with intellectual impairments thus could never be beautiful.Their exclusion from the realm of the aesthetically pleasing, according to Shaftesbury, had to do with their lack of a moral sense. Being able to practice virtue requires “a knowledge of right and wrong” and “a use of reason sufficient to secure a right application of the affections” (qtd. in Kelleher 79). Paul Kelleher sums up Shaftesbury’s thinking as follows: “[w]‌ithout enough reason, there is no access to the experience of moral beauty; without the ability to perceive the moral beauty of another’s (or one’s own) thoughts, affections, or actions, no virtue is possible” (79). Shaftesbury’s conclusion was that, no matter how appealing his or her looks, an idiot must be considered hideous: “All which is void of mind is horrid” (qtd. in Joshua 56). The Beautiful Idiot to whom Eugenia is exposed epitomizes just this sort of “horrid” mental deformity, and Kelleher argues that such deformed figures as this young woman served an ideological purpose: the rhetoric of deformity “makes possible the articulation of moral systems as such” (72). The deformed –​ whether in body or mind –​provided a foundation for an ableist understanding of what living a moral life entailed. The Beautiful Idiot would be incapable of living a moral life and, therefore, was shut out from membership in the human race. Eugenia grasps the point of the lesson: after viewing the freak spectacle she acquiesces, and her father praises her for seeing “that beauty, without mind, is more dreadful than any deformity” (311). We as readers can infer from the scene that Burney shared the father’s and Eugenia’s antipathy toward the Beautiful Idiot and people like her. When this character strikes herself and makes “a noise that resembled nothing human” (310), a reader gains the sense that she is not human.

Functional idiocy: gender and race Locke’s changeling designation captures a broad spectrum of people, sweeping in various subaltern populations and all those with human shape who were presumed to lack the ability to think abstractly. In short, “an assortment of marginalized groups…are stigmatized because of their [supposedly] diminished human faculties” (Simplican 28). As a result, even as the intelligence society was gradually changing the groups of people in power (from clerics and aristocrats to members of the bourgeoisie), it was, in terms of race and gender, reinscribing the older power dynamics. Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” (composed probably in the late 1690s but not published until 1713) contains a set of lines railing against the widespread assumption of female mental incapacity. Since the time of Aristotle, females had been deemed to be intellectually deficient due to their sex’s physiological constraints (Smith 467–​78), and this view carried forward into the eighteenth century (McDonagh 102–​12). Finch directly refers to this supposition in these lines: How are we fall’n, fall’n by mistaken rules? And education’s, more than nature’s fools, Debarred from all improvements of the mind, And to be dull, expected and designed. (51–​54) Finch’s phrase “nature’s fools” is key because it goes directly to the issue of functional idiocy. The common assumption was that women were born with a dispositional intellectual inadequacy (nature’s fools), one that rendered them cognitively impaired, making all women 103

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functional idiots as a matter of the ordinary course of things. Finch counters that this supposed innate mental inferiority stemmed rather from the structural inequality inherent in patriarchy. She protests that females are, if idiots at all, status idiots (“education’s…fools”) because social structures have forced them to be so. Finch’s point here is that educational opportunities should be opened to women so that they would no longer be idiots in either sense of the word. In her view, women had not yet benefited from the newly emerging intelligence society because they were not being allowed to join it. Finch’s protest poem indicates that, instead of casting aside the Aristotelian notion of women’s native intellectual inferiority, the new intelligence-​driven regime was merely reinscribing existing hierarchies in order to maintain status-​quo power dynamics. In a similar way, people of color were also presumed to be functional idiots. In Defoe’s 1723 novel Colonel Jack, an exchange takes place between Colonel Jack and a slave master in which the former advises the latter to moderate his harsh management of African slaves (185). When the slave master responds that kindness is lost on “Negroes” (185), Jack replies: “It may be true, sir, that there may be found here and there a Negro of a senceless, stupid, sordid Disposition, perfectly Untractable, undocible, and incapable of due Impressions; especially incapable of the Generosity of Principle which I am speaking of…if such a Refractory, undocible Fellow comes in our way, he must be dealt with first by the smooth ways, to Try him [kindness], then by the Violent way to Break his Temper, as they Break a Horse…” (185–​86) The racialized category of “savage” inherent in the passage’s language follows closely Locke’s description of changelings, indicating that Locke and Defoe were tapping into a common discursive thread. The slave master lumps all “Negroes” into Locke’s classification of changeling, while Jack, who, apprehending that Africans are “less than fully human,” is not nearly as dogmatic as his interlocutor. Neither character, however, entertains the possibility that Africans’ incorrigibility may stem not from any supposed innate mental inferiority but from the structural inequality inherent in the condition of slavery. Thus, while the emergence of intelligence society facilitated dramatic social change, the construct of intelligence was strategically defined to exclude nonwhite people.

Lemuel Gulliver, cognitive ableist par excellence In a 1725 letter to Pope, Swift protests against the “falsity of that definition animal rationale,” redefining the human as “rationis capax,” an animal capable of reason (“To Alexander Pope” 3.103). Rationality occurs in humans only from time to time and, even then, only for brief bursts. His formulation implicitly challenges Lockean epistemology, the emerging Enlightenment discourse of the perfectibility of “Man,” and the raison d’être of the intelligence society. Expanding upon this line of thinking is Part Four of his Gulliver’s Travels. As has been argued elsewhere, one would think that the secular demonizing of idiots that begins in earnest with the rise of the intelligence society would find its most scathing expression in the portrayal of the Yahoos –​ humanoids lacking the ability to reason. However, Swift, in a surprising move, turns the tables by demonizing the demonizer, making the book’s self-​proclaimed intelligent protagonist and aspirant to the intelligence society, Lemuel Gulliver, the butt of the satire. Gulliver reveals himself to be a cognitive ableist par excellence in his dealings with the Yahoos. His secular demonization of them could not be more intense, and the heatedness of his rejection of the Yahoos raises the question of whether they should be considered less than fully 104

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human in the same manner that Locke categorized changelings as not being fully human. Part Four resists definitively answering the question of whether the Yahoos are animal or human; it is constructed rather to force readers to confront the cognitive “other” in the Yahoo and then ask themselves what they would do if they found themselves in such an ethically charged but uncertain situation.The fully grown Yahoos exist –​at least in a Lockean view –​at the interstices of animal and human. And yet, this very subject  –​the Lockean view  –​is what comes into question in Part Four. Throughout the text Gulliver presents himself as one of the new, enlightened men, a proponent of empirical science, and someone who prides himself on his intellect. However, he cannot be taken at face value: Dennis Todd describes him as “[l]‌iteral-​minded and superficial,” someone who “travels through the world like the stereotypical tourist, staring at everything and seeing nothing” (150). As such, Gulliver becomes the satire’s principal butt: for the duration he manifests an intellectual narcissism that epitomizes cognitive ableism. As a character whose hubris involves intelligence, he sees in the Yahoos everything he wishes to define himself against. This is possible because the Yahoos differ just enough from the typical human form for Gulliver to not be able to recognize their humanity. Later, however, under the coaxing of his Houyhnhnm “master,” Gulliver is forced to acknowledge that he himself possesses the same shape as the typical Yahoo (4.3, 200). He thus finds himself trapped in a Yahoo body but yearning to join the Houyhnhnms –​the cognitively developed, reasonable, and sophisticated beings of the island. The Houyhnhnm community he wishes to join is, in fact, an intelligence society: the Houyhnhnms could be said to epitomize the intelligence society Goodey describes. In order to be admitted, Gulliver learns to speak Houyhnhnm and mimic both their virtues and even their gait. But if he is to become a full member, he too must bid for social status on the basis of intelligence, and this he cannot do. Smart in some respects, such as those involving imitation, Gulliver is not so in others. Paradoxically, then, the more that Gulliver attempts to emulate the Houyhnhnms, the more he thinks like a Yahoo. Having no way to join them, he finds himself relegated to occupying the fringe of this elite society. Even so, he persists in his attempts, and the only way he can succeed in joining is in the worst possible way, by becoming an oxymoronic “wonderful Yahoo” –​a self-​admitted freak (4.3, 199; 4.9, 229). Tolerating none of Gulliver’s ridiculous mimicry, the Houyhnhnms vote to expel him from the island, and so he must build a boat. It is in construction of it that the killing of Yahoos can be inferred because he employs their skins to make the sails. His tone is so casual about the acquisition of skins that it becomes evident that he neither thinks about what he is doing, nor knows how to think about the ethical issues that using the skins raises. This failure to grasp what is at stake brings into the foreground a central irony of Part Four, namely, that of the individual who aspires to join the intelligence society but who does not know how to think, at least when it comes to thinking about ethics. This falls into line with Swift’s overall critique in the Travels: figures like Locke and Isaac Newton had established and popularized ideas that moved society toward privileging factual knowledge and scientific progression but not toward achieving greater moral understanding (Kiernan 711). As the butt of the satire, Gulliver is rendered by Swift in such a way as to epitomize this lack. There is much more evidence to examine with regard to the way that Gulliver’s thinking process falls short. Gulliver is quick to engage in the secular demonization of the changeling Yahoos yet is inept at either making connections or understanding the meaning of what he does. Swift’s characterization of him draws attention to a fundamental weakness inherent in the intelligence society’s method of bidding for status. If its raison d’être was confidence that human intelligence was the highest social value, and yet this intelligence was value-​free, that is, oblivious of ethics –​ignorant regarding what to value –​then what capacity could it possess for sorting 105

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through thorny moral challenges such as the one Gulliver confronts when he meets the Yahoos? In Gulliver’s Travels, members of the intelligence society do not have a mechanism for thinking ethically about how to treat people who do not like look or think like them. Most importantly, by presenting the protagonist as a cognitive ableist who himself turns out to be a less-​than-​able thinker, the text calls attention to a flaw in intelligence-​society ideology: the radical divergence between a person’s assessment of his or her own mental powers and the actual acuity of those powers as others perceive them. Ultimately, Gulliver’s Travels calls upon readers to stop short of making sweeping generalizations of the kind the protagonist makes and instead exercise, in Ralph Savarese’s phrase, “an interpretive humility in the face of the cognitively ‘other’ ” (424).

Notes 1 Idiots, natural fools, changelings, and related terms have little to do with our contemporary understandings of IDD because, for the most part, the medical gaze was only beginning to form in the long eighteenth century. To go searching in the archive for figures and characters instantiating states of cognitive difference would be, to employ a telling pun, a fool’s errand (McDonagh, Goodey, and Stainton 1–​5). 2 See Neugebauer about idiots in medieval law. 3 Simplican maintains that Locke “exploits the indeterminacy between changelings and idiots, as their ignorance exemplifies the universal limits of human understanding and the outer limits of what is recognizably human” (36). For more regarding the intricacies of Locke’s use of changeling as opposed to idiot, natural fool, and related terms, see McDonagh, Goodey, and Stainton 3. 4 For more on Locke, changelings, and idiocy, see Goodey 313–​46; Simplican 25–​46; and Gabbard 108–​11.

Works cited Berger, James. The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity, New York University Press, 2014. Berrios. G. E.“Clinical Section –​Part II.” A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origin and History of Psychiatric Disorders. Edited by German E. Berrios and Roy Porter, New York University Press, 1995, pp. 225–​38. Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, Penguin, 2011. Burney, Frances. Camilla; or, A Picture of Youth, Oxford University Press, 1999. Calder, Martin. Encounters with the Other: A Journey to the Limits of Language through Works by Rousseau, Defoe, Prévost and Graffigny, Rodopi, 2003. Candland, Douglas Keith. Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature, Oxford University Press, 1993. Carlson, Licia. “Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reflections on the History of Mental Retardation.” Hypatia, vol. 16, no. 4, 2001, pp. 124–​45. Davis, Lennard. “Dr.  Johnson, Amelia, and the Discourse of Disability in the Eighteenth Century.” “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body. Edited by Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, University of Michigan Press, 2000, pp. 54–​74. Defoe, Daniel. Colonel Jack. Blackmask Online, 2002, www.public-​library.uk/​ebooks/​23/​14.pdf. Accessed March 20, 2018. —​—​—​. Mere Nature Delineated: Or, A Body without a Soul.Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe. Edited by Andrew Wear, Pickering & Chatto, 2002, pp. 151–​254. de Man, Paul.“The Epistemology of Metaphor.” Aesthetic Ideology. Edited by Andrzez Warminski, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 34–​50. Finch, Anne. “The Introduction.” Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/​poems/​50564/​the-​ introduction. Accessed May 14, 2018. Gabbard, D. Christopher.“ ‘A Defect in the Mind’: Cognitive Ableism in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.” Intellectual Disability: A Conceptual History 1200–​1900. Edited by Patrick McDonagh, Christopher Goodey, and Tim Stainton, Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 104–​26. Goodey, C. F. A History of Intelligence and “Intellectual Disability”: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe, Ashgate, 2011. Halliwell, Martin. Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film, Ashgate, 2004.

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From “changelings” to “libtards” “Idiot,” n.1., a, b, & c. Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2018, www.oed. com. Accessed March 4, 2018. —​—​—​. n.2., a & b. Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online, Oxford University Press, 2018, www.oed.com. Accessed March 4, 2018. “Idiota,” n. Harpers’ Latin Dictionary, Harper and Brothers, 1879. Jarrett, Simon, and C. F. Goodey. “Intellectual Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century.” The Cultural History of Disability, 6 vols, vol. 4. Edited by D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 121–​37. Joshua, Essaka. “Disability and Deformity: Function Impairment and Aesthetics in the Long Eighteenth Century.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. Edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 47–​61. Kelleher, Paul. “Defections from Nature: The Rhetoric of Deformity in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics.” The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century. Edited by Chris Mounsey, Bucknell University Press, 2014, pp.  71–​90. Kiernan, Colin. “Swift and Science.” The Historical Journal, vol. 14, no. 4, 1971, pp. 709–​22. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. Man Machine and Other Writings. Edited and translated by Ann Thomson, Cambridge University Press, 1966. Lindgren, Kristin. “Deafness in the Age of Enlightenment.” The Cultural History of Disability, vol. 4. Edited by D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 87–​103. Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Nidditch, Oxford University Press, 1975. Lyon, Janet. “The Parent Scholar.” Roundtable discussion. Modern Language Association Annual Conference,Vancouver, British Columbia. January 10, 2015. Martensen, Robert L. “Alienation and the Production of Strangers: Western Medical Epistemology and the Architectonics of the Body. A Historical Perspective.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, vol. 19, 1995, pp. 141–​82. McDonagh, Patrick. Idiocy: A Cultural History, Liverpool University Press, 2008. McDonagh, Patrick, C. F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton. “Introduction:  The Emergent Critical History of Intellectual Disability.” Intellectual Disability:  A Conceptual History, 1200–​1900. Edited by Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton, Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 1–​25. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependences of Discourse, University of Michigan Press, 2000. Muchembled, Robert. A History of the Devil from the Middle Ages to the Present. Translated by Jean Berrill, Polity, 2003. Newton, Michael. Savage Girls and Wild Boys:  A History of Feral Children, Thomas Dunne Books /​St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Novak, Maximillian. The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. Neugebauer, Richard. “Mental Handicap in Medieval and Early Modern England: Criteria, Measurement and Care.” From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency:  Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities. Edited by David Wright and Anne Digby, Routledge, 1996, pp. 22–​43. Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rall, Ted. Rall. Comic strip. November 8, 2004. www.gocomics.com/​rallcom/​2004/​11/​08/​. Accessed August 23, 2007. Savarese, Ralph. Reasonable People, Other Press, 2007. Simplican, Stacy. The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship, University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Smith, Nicholas. “Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women.” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 21, no. 4, 1983, pp. 467–​78. Stainton,Tim. “Reason,Value and Persons: The Construction of Intellectual Disability in Western Thought from Antiquity to the Romantic Age.” The Routledge History of Disability. Edited by Roy Hanes, Ivan Brown, and Nancy Hansen, Routledge, 2018, pp. 11–​34. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Edited by Albert J. Rivero, Norton, 2002. —​—​—​.“To Alexander Pope.” The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift [1725]. 5 vols. Edited by Harold Williams, Oxford University Press, 1963–​65.

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D. Christopher Gabbard Todd, Dennis. Imagining Monsters:  Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-​Century England, University of Chicago Press, 1995. Tucker, Robert, editor. The Marx-​Engels Reader. 2nd ed., Norton, 1978. Tunstall, Kate. “Conversations with the Blind, or ‘Aren’t You Surprised I Can Speak?’ ” The Cultural History of Disability, vol. 4. Edited by D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp.  73–​85. Wycherley, William. The Country Wife. Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Comedy. 2nd ed. Edited by Scott McMillin, Norton, 1997, pp. 3–​85.

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9 CRIP GOTHIC Affiliations of disability and queerness in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) Jason S. Farr

This chapter examines Horace Walpole’s use of nonnormative bodies in his gothic masterpiece, The Castle of Otranto (1764), to advance a long literary history of crip and queer affiliations. In what follows, I explore how widespread fears tied to the specters of disability and queerness shape eighteenth-​century family life and the early gothic mode in Britain. Alison Kafer, Robert McRuer, and Carrie Sandahl, among others, have explored the subversive intersections of disability and queerness in more recent forms of cultural production  –​in art, literature, film, popular culture, and activism. In The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (2015), David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder distill one of the prevailing assumptions that undergirds this vibrant line of inquiry, arguing that “all bodies identified as excessively deviant are queer in the sense that they represent discordant functionalities and outlaw sexualities” (3). For Mitchell and Snyder, the queerness of variable bodies is expressed through subversive sexual practices, and in public spaces, where people with disabilities unsettle the ableist gaze through unanticipated movements. They further argue that the social exclusion of “crip/​queer forms of embodiment” occurs in the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of sexual prohibition within biopolitics (3). While I concur that biopolitics and the implementation of sexual taboos play vital roles in consolidating crip and queer embodiment, I argue that there is a longer cultural history at work here. During the eighteenth century, for instance, impaired, ill, and otherwise variable bodies are often represented as obstacles to cross-​sex desire, romance, and reproduction. In these narratives, a healthy constitution and appearance are regarded as crucial for fostering heterosexual bonds, while physical difference often signals nonstandard sexual desire. When read with attention to the nonnormative bodies and queer desires depicted within their pages, eighteenth-​century novels offer insights into how deeply embedded and intertwined emerging conceptions of heteronormativity and able-​bodiedness are in the British and Western traditions. Novels, with their focus on ongoing conflicts between embodied self and society, enable insights into the many ideological incongruities inherent in systems that privilege certain bodies and desires over others. Several authors from the period penned critiques of normative embodiment and desire, and even conceived of alternative social orders that reworked the status quo. For instance, in Millenium Hall (1762), Sarah Scott depicts women’s sapphic bonds and extraordinary bodies as foundational for the reorganization of British society. Taken together, disability and queerness anchor Scott’s utopian vision. 109

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Though a far cry from the utopian premise of Scott’s nearly contemporaneous novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) also situates disability and queerness as sources of troubling, persistent tension for genteel and aristocratic British society. Along with Scott, Walpole critiques dominant social systems in which the degradation of women and people with disabilities are taken as a matter of course. The Castle of Otranto highlights these systems’ reliance upon three discursive formations, through which we may perceive emerging constructions of heteronormativity and able-​bodiedness in the Enlightenment:  the system of primogeniture, early theories of degeneracy, and the culture of libertinism. These legal, scientific, and political structures rely upon the mutual constitution of disability and queerness. Walpole exploits cultural anxieties tied to these systems through key plot developments that lead to the novel’s climactic “castatrophe,” in which father murders daughter, a family’s unjust dynasty collapses, and order seems to be restored to the many unruly excesses that appear throughout the narrative (6). Beyond the plot device that queerness and disability represent within the narrative, Walpole levels a critique at the very systems that rely upon normative embodiment and desire. In this sense, Walpole’s envisioning of the gothic is not only amenable to queer subject formation, as George Haggerty has argued: we might also think about the novel as crip for the way that it situates impairment as the critical, resilient center of narrative that haunts healthy, able bodies.1 Though Conrad, the “sickly” heir to the throne of Otranto, dies on the second page, he is key for understanding how queerness and disability disturb the promises of reproductive futurity. Walpole’s portrayal of Conrad’s haunting presence underscores the lingering violence that heteronormative codes impose upon individual bodies, and reveals that the idea of health (still in its nascent modern formulation in the eighteenth century) is an elusive fantasy.2 Disability carries greater weight than mere plot catalyst in Walpole’s novel; it is, rather, that to which the narrative gestures as an inevitable state of the body and mind. Through close attention to associations of chronic illness and queerness, this chapter demonstrates the considerable role that impairment plays in in the early British gothic genre and in the literary history of sexuality.

The system of primogeniture and Conrad’s chronic illness The instability which pervades the system of primogeniture constitutes much of the family drama in The Castle of Otranto. This system, in which the eldest son inherits a landed family’s estate unencumbered, depends entirely upon the notion of healthy young men and women who merge family interests through alliance marriage, socially sanctioned sexual practice, reproduction, and effective child-​rearing, all so that the next generation can repeat this well-​trodden pattern. Through these seemingly inviolable principles, elite, landed families could sustain their interests from generation to generation. In novels such as Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814), Jane Austen portrays the difficulties of such a legal framework for young women, who are vulnerable in this exacting, male-​centered arrangement. However, the Jane Bennets and Fanny Prices of Austen’s fiction are not the only characters exposed to the precarious conditions of patrilineal succession. Walpole also explores the demanding social pressures of reproductive futurity by creating a male character in Conrad whose ostensible sexual impotence threatens to overturn succession and property inheritance. Throughout Walpole’s novel –​widely considered the first in the British gothic tradition –​ queerness and disability haunt the tyrant Manfred, who ultimately cannot sustain his lineage due to their very persistence. In the narrative’s first pages, Manfred’s only son, Conrad, is bound to marry Isabella, the daughter of a rival aristocrat, to consolidate Manfred’s already precarious status as ruler of Otranto. However, young Conrad –​“a homely youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition” –​suffers from an unnamed chronic illness, and the impending nuptials are 110

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delayed until his “infirm state of health would permit” the ceremony (17). Despite Manfred’s wife Hippolita’s anxieties pertaining to their son Conrad’s various bodily impairments, Manfred is eager to establish the union because he is consumed by an obsessive desire to preserve his reign through the reproductive extension of his family line, and to live down the ancient prophesy “That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it” (17). When the much-​anticipated marriage is about to occur, however, Conrad is found “dashed to pieces” by a mysterious, “enormous” knight’s helmet, an overdetermined symbol of archaic male virility that crushes him beneath its unbearable weight (18). It is soon revealed by an unknown peasant (who turns out to be Theodore, the rightful prince) that the helmet belongs to the statue of a prince from former times, Alfonso the Good, whose massive, armored resemblance is housed nearby, at the Church of St. Nicolas.The helmet’s “miraculous” decimation of Conrad is suggestive of the illegitimacy of Manfred’s claim to the principality, driving Manfred into a frenzied set of senseless, despotic actions to uphold his status as sovereign (20). Conrad is a central figure for the British gothic genre generally. His “disfigured corpse,” Haggerty argues, becomes “central to the formation of subjectivity in gothic fiction” for the way that it connotes an “erotics of loss” (24). I would add that, in addition to the loss connoted by Conrad’s queerness, Conrad’s impairment is at the center of Walpole’s work. Conrad is, after all, chronically ill, and his bloody annihilation under the weight of the armor’s monstrous masculinity sets in motion Manfred’s tyranny, including his incestuous lusting after, and sexual violence toward, Isabella. Conrad is not just a peripheral character who is eradicated on the very first pages of the novel; he is the queer, disabled catalyst of the plot, and by extension, of the early British gothic genre. Conrad’s untimely death creates the major conflict of the narrative: with no male heirs to whom he could pass his ancestor Ricardo’s ill-​gotten monarchical claim, Manfred decides to divorce Hippolita and marry Isabella himself. As Manfred makes his case to Isabella for their union, he urges her to forget her now deceased fiancée Conrad in the following terms: [h]‌e was a sickly, puny child, and Heaven has perhaps taken him away, that I might not trust the honours of my house on so frail a foundation. The line of Manfred calls for numerous supports. My foolish fondness for that boy blinded the eyes of my prudence –​but it is better as it is. I hope, in a few years, to have reason to rejoice at the death of Conrad…Instead of a sickly boy, you shall have a husband in the prime of his age, who will know how to value your beauties, and who may expect a numerous offspring. (23–​24) Through Manfred’s audacious and heartless justification for marriage to Isabella, Walpole elucidates a deeply engrained system of thought that stigmatizes disabled people as weak, as anomalous, as lesser than. Manfred assumes here the status of “normate,” which as Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson argues, is a social identity in which an able-​bodied man assumes a place of privilege and power based on his blatant marginalization of physical, sensory, or intellectual difference (8–​9). In identifying his “fondness” for Conrad as that which “blinded his eyes,” Manfred articulates his baseness through ableist language meant to capture his own temporary inability to “see” the truth of his stymied lineage (23). It might seem as though Walpole abides by the logic that sustains the normate by eliminating Conrad so early on in the narrative, excluding forever the possibility that Manfred’s succession might be passed down through his son. However, Manfred represents the normate’s unforgiving principles and limiting logics, which Walpole critiques by exposing Manfred’s delirious and desperate attempts to secure authority through his unrelenting authoritarianism. By establishing Manfred’s partiality for able-​bodiedness, even 111

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at the expense of the memory of a recently deceased and beloved son, Walpole shows that such values contaminate familial relations. Within this framework, the likes of Conrad are perceived to be better dead than alive because impairment is thought of as a fate worse than death. Death, however, cannot and does not eradicate the specter of disability in the narrative. The above passage also reveals that Conrad is sexually suspect. Because, as Manfred implies, Conrad does not know how to “value” the “beauties” of Isabella, he has no place in the courtship drama. The “frail foundation” that Manfred identifies refers to Conrad’s incapacity to produce a healthy male heir to continue the family line. In other words, it is because he is chronically ill that Conrad is also queer; he stands outside of the normative frameworks of heterosexual desire and patrilineal succession due to his “sickly” constitution. Manfred’s invoking of Conrad’s infertility as he attempts to exercise authority over Isabella’s body indicates that heteronormativity and ableism are his foremost rhetorical strategies to enact unbridled patriarchal domination. Manfred’s conceptualization of male health as a vital factor for successful procreation indicates a moment of rhetorical clarity in the midst of the unhinged disorder to which he has succumbed in the wake of his son’s demise. Questions would of course surround Manfred’s own “foundation”: after all, he and Hippolita have only given birth to two children, one of whom is chronically ill. Through the characterization of Conrad’s queerness, and the desperate measures that Manfred takes as a result of his own reproductive ineptitude, Walpole draws attention to the consternation surrounding variably-​embodied male heirs who bear the burden of continuing the family line. Though Conrad’s debilitating illness might seem to serve as an intergenerational reflection of his father’s moral deformity and the family’s fragile, unjust claim, it becomes the means by which Walpole reveals Manfred’s hard-​heartedness and vicious inclinations. The system of primogeniture, which operates under the coordinates of health and heterosexuality, is thus shown to perpetuate violence when its narrow script is unsettled. This disruption of heterosexual reproduction is also the narrative tension that Walpole dramatizes to heighten the horror of the narrative. The plot tension of Walpole’s gothic tale inheres not only in the impaired body of Conrad, but also in a system that prescribes normative embodiment and heterosexual desire as buttressing authority across generations. During the eighteenth century in Britain, the shift away from an emphasis on monarchical rule to that of a parliamentary one might seem to entail a move away from the fundamental practice of primogeniture for elite families. However, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a key moment that would appear to mark such a shift (in which Parliament opted for James II’s daughter over his eldest son as ruler), did not eradicate the public’s obsession with the procreative practices of its rulers, as Lisa Forman Cody has shown. Even after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which seemed to bring about a new era of Lockean political reason that triumphed over the primacy of bloodlines, the familial and procreative practices of British rulers continued to occupy public discourse, and, as we can see in The Castle of Otranto, literature (Cody 6). Though they generally consolidate the cultural values of emergent middle classes, eighteenth-​century novels also participate in what Nancy Armstrong calls a “panoptical conception” of domesticity that sustain the principles of primogeniture, and include representations of aristocratic privilege such as that which is depicted in The Castle of Otranto (130). In fact, one of the novel’s greatest mysteries, which is not revealed until the final pages, is that the apprehensions provoked by Conrad’s compromised virility are intensified by Manfred’s desperate but ultimately futile attempts to avoid the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy, that his ancestor, Ricardo’s “posterity should reign in Otranto…as long as issue male from Ricardo’s loins should remain to enjoy it” (104).The prophecy only heightens the urgency of reproduction, and in his absolutist adherence to this social obligation, Manfred becomes the basest of villains: he seeks to divorce Hippolita; he offers his daughter, Matilda, to Frederic in 112

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exchange for union with Isabella; and finally, when his temper reaches its zenith, he murders his only remaining child, Matilda, in cold blood in the Church of St. Nicolas. At the heart of these narrative conflicts is the inherent problem of compulsory heterosexuality and health that undergirds the system of primogeniture. It is because of the absolutely entrenched nature of primogeniture that Manfred seeks in vain to step in as able-​bodied replacement for Conrad’s heterosexual failure. Conrad’s body is a threat to the established order of the castle, but as we finally discover at the end of the narrative, his fate had already been sealed long before his birth. Disability and queerness thus serve as the foremost threats to the continuity of the state, according to Walpole’s narrative. Despite the spectacular way that he is decimated by the oversized rendering of Alfred the Good’s masculinity, Conrad’s presence is never eradicated from the plot, and in this we observe his crip haunting of heteronormativity. Given this inauspicious ending for Conrad, a yawning chasm would seem to divide him from the other male characters in the novel. While Manfred, “in the prime of his age” and seemingly of a vigorous body, discourses at length about his rule, and Theodore –​valiant, robust, and handsome –​articulates his righteous resistance to Manfred, Conrad never actually speaks (24). However, Conrad haunts the present tense of the narrative until the ending, when Theodore finally becomes the rightful prince of Otranto. At two points in the novel especially, Conrad’s crip hauntings disrupt exchanges between Theodore and his potential romantic interests, Isabella and Matilda, who believe that the eerie sounds and visions they confront are attributable to Conrad’s ghost. In Matilda’s case, unfamiliar noises interrupt a conversation between her and her servant, Bianca, about her romantic prospects with Theodore: “Blessed Mary!” said Bianca, starting, “there it is again! Dear Madam, do you hear nothing? this castle is certainly haunted!” “Peace!” said Matilda, “and listen! I  did think I  heard a voice  –​but it must be fancy: your terrors, I suppose, have infected me.” “Indeed! indeed! Madam,” said Bianca, half-​weeping with agony, “I am sure I heard a voice.” “Does anybody lie in the chamber beneath?” said the Princess. “Nobody has dared to lie there,” answered Bianca, “since the great astrologer, that was your brother’s tutor, drowned himself. For certain, Madam, his ghost and the young Prince’s are now met in the chamber below –​for Heaven’s sake let us fly to your mother’s apartment!” (39–​40) In this stilted conversation between Matilda and Bianca, terror is couched as infection, which Matilda imagines to have passed from Bianca to herself. The source of said infectious terror is initially attributed to Conrad, whose ghost, Bianca supposes, mingles with that of his deceased tutor. Their ghostly cohabitation in the chamber below is suggestive of a pederastic relationship that haunts Bianca’s heteronormative fantasy and disrupts her attempts to instigate a romance between Matilda and Theodore. In the end, the noises stem not from homophile ghosts, but from Theodore. Bianca and Matilda’s conflation of Conrad with Theodore suggests that Conrad is Theodore’s ghostly double. A very similar misunderstanding occurs as Isabella flees Manfred and encounters Theodore in the castle’s underground passages. When she initially senses Theodore’s presence, Isabella wrongly supposes that he is “the ghost of her betrothed Conrad,” only to soon be disabused of her misperception (28). During her frightening escape from Manfred, Isabella is haunted by the injunction to marry someone that she does not love. Once again, Conrad’s ghost functions as a double to Theodore, in the way that the doppelganger, for Freud, represents the projection of 113

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repressed desires and traumatic fears imposed by social taboos (219–​253). Conrad and Theodore seem far from one another in terms of their physical constitutions, but their proximity to one another in these passages reveals something about the temporary nature of corporeal vigor. By portraying this uncanny crip troubling of the masculine ideal, Walpole implies that, despite what measures might be taken, disability inevitably endures in the context of heterosexual, able-​bodied courtship. Walpole’s narrative reveals that ongoing preoccupations with chronic illness, physical difference, and sexual dysfunction are the stuff of recurring heteronormative nightmares. And indeed, this is the case if we look to the ending of The Castle of Otranto as a circular culmination of the narrative. In the final pages,Theodore, previously the intrepid hero, has become permanently depressive. He finds in his new wife, Isabella, “one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul” due to his beloved Matilda’s death at the hands of Manfred (105). Given Conrad’s lingering presence, physical disability is not eliminated until the novel’s end, only to be supplanted by the psychological variance of Theodore, who will never come to terms with Matilda’s untimely demise. In this sense, Alfred the Good’s past haunts the present tense of Manfred’s unjust rule in the same way that Conrad’s chronically sick body troubles the masculine vigor of Manfred and Theodore.There is no “happily ever after,” as the gothic teaches us, even for the likes of Theodore, who would seem to have it all in a corporeal sense. Disability becomes one of the persistent and circular elements of Walpole’s narrative –​evident from the very start, and despite a number of events which would seem to subdue it, still evident at the end. Melancholia is, admittedly, a very different discursive and lived experience from the chronic illness that Conrad possesses, but in a parallel fashion, these two forms of impairment function as symptomatic markers of aristocratic privilege and insularity. Far from offering resolutions for embodied and psychological variability, The Castle of Otranto divulges that these states are inevitable qualities of the human experience, that they accompany the just and the unjust in equally insistent ways. The reader is left to imagine what the future might hold for Theodore and Isabella: will their marriage, like that of Manfred and Hippolita, be disturbed by a complex negotiation of the imperatives of primogeniture for the extension of their family line? And just what does impairment signify in the context of procreation in this period?

Degeneracy in the eighteenth century Besides exposing the central significance of heteronormativity and able-​bodiedness for the system of primogeniture, Walpole’s excision of Conrad from the first pages of The Castle of Otranto belies an enduring cultural assumption, that disability is thought to render one incapable of engaging in procreative heterosexuality. When Manfred tells Isabella that his line “calls for numerous supports” he may as well be talking about heterosexuality itself, which relies on an array of ideological stakes  –​ranging from courtship rituals, to gender performativity, and from sentiment to standard sexual intercourse –​to sustain itself as the ultimate source of moral sensibility.3 In the eighteenth century, disability complicates heterosexuality, for, as theories of degeneracy stipulated, it raises the possibility that the propagation of future generations might be compromised. As The Castle of Otranto makes clear, Enlightenment-​era apprehensions surrounding variably-​embodied people sometimes involved their ability to bear healthy children. Fears about disabled people engaging in procreative sexual intercourse –​the idea, especially, that this would bring about degeneracy in future generations –​underscore the indissoluble character of disability and sexuality in eighteenth-​century Britain, a full century before Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics.” In The History of Sexuality, Volume One:  An Introduction (1990), 114

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Michel Foucault identifies the emergence of eugenics and psychoanalysis as two “innovations in the technology of sex” in the latter half of the nineteenth century, which, together, helped to forge modern sexuality: [t]‌he theory of “degenerescence” made it possible for [psychoanalysis and eugenics] to perpetually refer back to one another; it explained how a heredity that was burdened with various maladies (it made little difference whether these were organic, functional, or psychical) ended by producing a sexual pervert (look into the genealogy of an exhibitionist or a homosexual: you will find a hemiplegic ancestor, a phthisic parent, or an uncle afflicted with senile dementia); but it went on to explain how a sexual perversion resulted in the depletion of one’s line of descent –​rickets in the children, the sterility of future generations.The series composed of perversion-​heredity-​degenerescence formed the solid nucleus of the new technologies of sex. (118) As Foucault argues here, the linkage between bodies and desires coalesce around emerging theories of eugenics and psychoanalysis, for “perverse” sexual practices were perceived to result in the degeneration of a family’s lineage. If perversity occurs, degeneracy follows; if people with physical or cognitive disabilities reproduce, they give birth to perverts, or so scientists argued. Foucault establishes this mutually sustaining set of principles as central to what he terms “the deployment of sexuality,” a system of sexuality which gradually supplants the “deployment of alliance” from the eighteenth century onward. He characterizes this shift as one in which laws and customs that prohibit certain sexual practices (the deployment of alliance) are supplanted by an “intensification of the body –​with its exploitation as an object of knowledge and an element in relations of power” (107). For Foucault, the establishment of eugenics and psychoanalysis epitomize this new approach to the body, in which science links perversion with degeneracy. In this way, heterosexuality is established discursively as a system that is, in its ideal form, devoid of physical or cognitive impairment. Theories of degeneracy, however, did not emerge suddenly with Freud or Galton. We may look back to the eighteenth century to see evidence of its prehistory. One mid-​eighteenth-​ century tract, for example, allows us to envision contemporaneous ideas about sex and degeneracy.This work, an English translation from a 1655 advice book called Callipedie by the French doctor and poet, Claude Quillet, imagines a future free of deformity and illness as an achievable goal for young partners in marriage. In his standardization of unruly desires and bodies, Quillet counsels newlyweds on how to have “healthy and beautiful Offspring,” which he argues, “is not only the highest Pleasure and Honour to Parents, but of great Importance to Mankind in general” (preface). In the opening lines to Advice to New-​Married Persons: Or, The Art of Having Beautiful Children (1750) (which is the English translation of Quillet’s work), Quillet comments upon the importance of the rites and customs of the marital bed for establishing this perfect future: The muse instructive shall their Offspring grace, And form the future Honours of their Race: Beauty the long successive Line shall crown, And no deform’d unsightly Birth be known. (2) The imperative of heterosexual reproductive futurity that is apparent in these lines speaks to the legal custom of patrilineal succession. Quillet explains to young husbands and wives how to avoid giving birth to the “misshapen breed” that would dilute the “purity” of their lineage (34). 115

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While beauty is adorned with a crown, the ultimate symbol of triumph and rule, the “unsightly Birth” is, like Conrad, eliminated and thereby deemed a nonsubject.Thus, any “deformed” birth becomes a manifestation of procreative failure. Conrad, with his chronic illness, is a literary representation of such ableist thinking: he stands in for the degeneracy of Manfred’s lineage as a symptom of Manfred’s perverse inclinations. With such an investment in certain forms of embodiment and health made manifest, Quillet imagines a future in which disability has disappeared due to the wholesome reproductive practices of young, beautiful couples.This tract thus advances the notion that the “race” of various families could be perfected by rooting out “unsightly” bodies if sexual partners avoid unsightly bodies as partners, and if they adhere to certain principles.To do heterosexuality correctly, in other words, is to eradicate deformity.This line of thought, as Foucault would argue, is indicative of larger cultural forces that policed sex, “that is, not through the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses” (25). Ann Laura Stoler claims that the sort of thinking embedded in this tract foreshadows modern forms of racism, in that it merges middle-​class domesticity, sexuality, and “regular” forms of embodiment into a productive discourse that would eventually culminate in a scientific vision that “undesirables,” in terms of race and/​or disability, could be eradicated from human populations (125). Such a racist, ableist envisioning of heterosexuality serves as one of the baseline assumptions that Walpole dramatizes to maximum effect.

Libertinism and disability Beyond encompassing the system of primogeniture and emergent theories of degeneracy, The Castle of Otranto also critiques the culture of libertinism, another system that brings together disability and sexuality in the eighteenth century. While earlier novels and literary works examine the libertine’s reform –​perhaps most notably, in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) –​ Walpole’s work capitalizes on the notion of the unreformed aristocratic man who gives way to his animal spirits and uses his sexuality as a tool to dominate and exploit those beneath him. Manfred’s base villainy and lurid desire establish him as such a memorable monster. One may examine this in his unabashed pursuit of Isabella, whom he sexually terrorizes for the purposes of strengthening his political power. As I  have argued elsewhere, libertine sexuality is marked by a mobilization of political and sexual ascendancy through the complex negotiation of corporeal vigor (Farr 96–​118). In this milieu, there is often a dismissal of physically disabled women as sexually impenetrable, and an emasculation of disabled men due to the perception that they are incapable of active sexual penetration. In the context of libertine embodiment, able-​bodiedness serves as linchpin for the dominant sexual posturing of libertine men, but also renders them vulnerable to sexual dysfunction, a kind of temporary disability that muddles the boundary between masculinity and emasculation, ability and disability. This is observable in John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” in which the male speaker is forced to confront the question of his own virility. After prematurely ejaculating with his lover Corinna, the speaker is thereafter unable to get an erection. Sexual dysfunction defines the poem and serves as a reminder of the vulnerability of not only the libertine’s sexual dominance, but of his political ascendancy, for the two are resolutely conjoined in the culture of libertinism.4 This is the case until the very end of the poem, at which point the speaker concedes that there are “ten thousand abler pricks” that could potentially make up for his loss (15–​17). The notion that an unnamed substitute penis will please Corinna, who remains unfulfilled, frustrated, and subordinate, ultimately restores the order of male dominance that the poem comes so close to undermining.

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Such negotiation of desire and embodiment are at work in another Restoration text, William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1775). Horner, the play’s rake-​hero, is driven to cuckold men, which, as Eve Sedgwick argues, is his primary motive, establishing the significance of male homosocial bonding for perpetuating the “traffic in women” and generating the play’s plot (49–​66). He is aided in these endeavors by feigning a case of the syphilis that he is supposed to have contracted while gallivanting about in France. Once the physician Quack’s reports spread of Horner’s impotence –​that he is “as bad as a eunuch” –​ Horner hopes to have free access to the women of the town (4). His scheme ends up working. Horner has a dalliance with Lady Fidget, whose husband, Sir Jasper, seems utterly unconcerned about the sexual threat posed by a man who has contracted a sexually transmitted infection, during the memorable “China scene.” When Sir Jasper walks in on Lady Fidget and Horner with their arms about each other, Lady Fidget is able to pass it off as an innocent game of tickling. What is more, Horner and Lady Fidget continue their sexual frolicking in Sir Jasper’s presence, behind a closed bedroom door (56). Through his successful performance of disease, Horner becomes the virile rake-​hero of the play, and true to Restoration court culture, enjoys his sexuality without having to marry in the end. In this case, the performance of disease  –​of eunuchism  –​grants the libertine the gratification of his animal spirits. Thus, libertinism is defined in part by one’s negotiation of ability and disability, or of health and illness, in the context of sexuality, further reinforcing how absolutely interconnected disability and sexuality are in the Restoration, and in the century to follow. Walpole, writing nearly 100  years later, imagines a very different kind of male sexual dominance, in which politically ascendant men come to embody the horrific impulses of unrestrained libido and appetite for power. Walpole is able to capitalize on cultural apprehensions about procreation, succession, and sexual excess  –​all through the ideology of ability  –​in order to establish a tale of horror that struck a chord with eighteenth-​century readers, and that set the tone for a new generations of writers such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew G. Lewis, and Charlotte Dacre.

Conclusion In The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole exploits cultural anxieties tied to the system of primogeniture, theories of degeneracy, and the culture of libertinism to create a suspenseful tale of horror that has resonated with readers since its publication. Part of the novel’s lasting influence derives from its engagement with discourses of embodiment deemed vital for the advancement of the British nation. As a ghostly presence from the past that haunts the prospective heterosexual romances of Walpole’s novel, Conrad reminds us of the critical light that physical difference shines on the normate. Through Conrad and his double, the “forever” melancholic Theodore,Walpole reveals that disability is an inevitable facet of human existence despite efforts from the likes of Manfred and, in another context, Claude Quillet, to eradicate it (105). Though many novels from the eighteenth century establish healthy marriages as their resolution, the coordination of heterosexual marriage and health prove illusory in The Castle of Otranto. In Walpole’s gothic tale, disability and queerness disturb social systems that subordinate and exclude an array of bodies and desires through the guise of rationality. We may understand Conrad’s lingering presence in The Castle of Otranto as crip reworking of these systems and of the able-​bodied, heterosexual futures they promulgate. Walpole’s novel and the gothic genre he helped to define enjoy enduring cultural resonance due in large part to the nonnormative bodies that repeatedly and successfully subvert normalcy.5

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Notes 1 The title of this essay is inspired by George Haggerty’s Queer Gothic (Urbana-​Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2006).To read more about how physical difference figures in gothic novels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Ruth Bienstock Anolik’s collection of essays, Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010). 2 Christopher Lawrence argues that modern British notions of “health” are historically tied to Industrialization-​era medical practices, such as surgical intervention, which mark the shift from humoral to biomedical theories of the body. See Lawrence, Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 62. 3 Paul Kelleher discusses sentiment’s role in constituting heterosexual love as moral imperative. See Kelleher, Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-​Century Literature. 4 My reading of Rochester has been informed to some extent by Melissa E.  Sanchez’s “Libertinism and Romance in Rochester’s Poetry” and Harold Weber’s The Restoration Rake-​Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-​Century England. 5 Portions of this essay previously appeared in “Introduction:  Disability and the Literary History of Sexuality,” in Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-​Century British Literature, by Jason S. Farr (Bucknell University Press, 2019).

Works cited Anolik, Ruth Bienstock. Demons of the Body and Mind:  Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature. 1st ed. McFarland, 2010. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford University Press, 1990. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Edited by James Kinsley. Oxford University Press, 2003. —​—​—​. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by James Kinsley. Oxford University Press, 2004. Cody, Lisa Forman. Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-​Century Britons. Oxford University Press, 2005. Farr, Jason S. “Libertine Sexuality and Queer-​Crip Embodiment in Eighteenth-​Century Britain.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, 2016, pp. 96–​118. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality,Vol. 1: An Introduction. Reissue ed.Vintage, 1990. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Hogarth Press, 1986, pp. 219–​253. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies:  Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York University Press, 1996. Haggerty, George. Queer Gothic. University of Illinois Press, 2006. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013. Kelleher, Paul. Making Love:  Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-​ Century British Literature. Bucknell University Press, 2015. Lawrence, Christopher. Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain, 1700–​1920. Routledge, 1994. McMillin, Scott, editor. Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Comedy. 2nd ed.W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York University Press, 2006. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. The Biopolitics of Disability:  Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. University of Michigan Press, 2015. Quillet, Claude. Advice to New-​Married Persons: Or,The Art of Having Beautiful Children. London, 1750. Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. Edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely. Oxford Univerity Press, 2004. Sanchez, Melissa E. “Libertinism and Romance in Rochester’s Poetry.” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, 2005, pp. 441–​459. Sandahl, Carrie. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, Apr. 2003, pp. 25–​56. Scott, Sarah. Millenium Hall. Edited by Gary Kelley. Broadview Press, 1995. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press, 1992. Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke University Press, 1995. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Edited by Nick Groom. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Crip gothic Weber, Harold. The Restoration Rake-​Hero:  Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-​Century England. University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester. Selected Works. Edited by H. Frank Ellis. Penguin Classics, 2004. Wycherley, William. The Country Wife. In Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Comedy. Edited by Scott McMillin. Norton Critical Editions, 1997, pp. 3–​78.

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10 “OF WONDERFUL USE TO EVERYONE” Disability and the marriage plot in the nineteenth-​century  novel Clare Walker Gore It is a truth universally acknowledged that a disabled character in a Victorian novel must remain in want of a wife (or husband). Although disabled characters are to be found across the field of Victorian fiction, occupying roles ranging from the comic to the tragic, from the villainous to the saintly, and from the peripheral to the privileged, they are only very, very rarely allowed to star in their own marriage plots. Indeed, their exclusion from the marriage plot might be taken as the clearest possible example of how disabled characters are disabled as characters in the Victorian novel, their ability to act in this plot-​line starkly curtailed by their membership of a stigmatised identity category. This taboo cannot be explained away by any simple equation between purportedly realist fiction and historical reality: it is clear that in the real world, then as now, disabled people regularly married. Prejudice may well have complicated their love lives, but it certainly did not make marriage impossible: many if not most of the most prominent disabled individuals in the nineteenth century were married, including Henry Fawcett (who was blind), Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh (who was limbless), John Kitto (who was profoundly deaf), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who suffered chronic pain and was periodically unable to walk). Characters in novels who share these same disabilities, however, are almost always depicted as unable to marry. Tellingly, the reaction of contemporary critics to plot lines in which disabled characters did marry suggests that, rather than finding this prospect unrealistic, they found it unseemly. When Wilkie Collins brought his blind heroine’s marriage plot to an unusually happy ending in Poor Miss Finch (1872), for example, a critic writing in The Saturday Review that same year objected that while he had “little doubt that Mr. Wilkie Collins has made his blind girl more faithful to nature in thought, act, and speech than Lord Lytton’s Nydia”,1 such realism was undesirable: “it seems to us that an infirmity like blindness should chill the passions to a temperature in which it would be impossible for love to spring up” (“Poor Miss Finch” 282, 283; emphasis added). It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore fully the complex of anxieties which might have lain behind this critic’s unexplained preference for unhappy celibacy over matrimony as a narrative fate for disabled characters, but it seems reasonable to assume that it was rooted in fears about heredity and its mysterious workings (might disabled parents transmit their disabilities to their offspring?), economic productivity and “unfitness” (should those unfit to compete in the capitalist marketplace be allowed to participate in the marriage market?), the instability of gender

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(were men feminised by disability, and could feminised men be sexually attractive to women?), and much more besides.2 What I want to examine in this chapter is not so much the causes as the consequences of this unwillingness on the part of nineteenth-​century novelists and readers to see disabled characters starring in their own marriage plots. Far from shutting them out altogether from the marriage plot, their exclusion from what we might call the central role –​that of the successful suitor or successfully-​sought beloved –​actually enables them to act more effectively in ancillary and supporting roles. When you begin to look for them, you realise that disabled characters are crucial actors in a plethora of nineteenth-​century marriage plots, and that their work as midwives to other people’s marriages depends upon their disabled identity in a variety of different ways. An identity rooted in dysfunction –​what the OED defines as being “[r]‌endered incapable of action or use; incapacitated; taken out of service” (“Disabled, Adj. and N.”) –​actually enables these characters to perform certain essential narrative roles. Once we recognise the narrative utility of disability, it is far easier to understand why these supposedly “incapacitated” characters are cast in so many plots, marriage plots included. In his compelling analysis of what he calls the “character-​system” of nineteenth-​century fiction, Alex Woloch suggests that minor characters are the “proletariat” of the novel, performing essential narrative labour without enjoying the narrative rewards allotted to the privileged, major characters (14, 27). I am similarly suggesting that disabled characters are the worker bees of the marriage plot, labouring without reward, and in many cases able to perform this labour precisely because they are always already excluded from the possibility of reward (that is, from taking the place of the hero or heroine and marrying the protagonist themselves). In what remains of this chapter, I will outline three of the paradigms by which disabled characters grease the wheels of the marriage plot, and the ways in which their ability to perform this particular narrative work is dependent upon their disabled identity, as the text constructs it. In each case, I will also offer an example in which this paradigm is subverted or troubled. The conventions surrounding the representation of disabled characters enabled authors to thicken the problems of their plots, as well as to cut through them: as we shall see, as often as they found ways to put disabled characters to work in the service of the marriage plot, novelists seem to have been unable to resist creating rebellious disabled characters who struggled against the plot role they were assigned.

The queer go-​between In this first paradigm, the able-​bodied hero’s disabled friend rights the temporarily derailed marriage plot by drawing on the skills he has developed as a result of his feminised gender identity. Confined to the domestic sphere, the disabled friend has both the ability and the licence to say and do things which are impossible for the hero constrained by a more rigid code of masculinity. This enables him to resolve the tensions and misunderstandings clogging up the marriage plot, and to mediate between hero and heroine. One of the clearest instances of a disabled character who puts his fluid gender identity to work in the service of the marriage plot in this way is Phineas Fletcher, the narrator of Dinah Mulock Craik’s bestselling John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). Phineas Fletcher, affluent tradesman’s son, and John Halifax, destitute orphan, are brought together in the first chapter by Phineas’s need for physical assistance, and John’s ability to supply it. Having volunteered to help frail Phineas home, John “safely and carefully” carries him up the stairs, “turn[ing] it into a jest so as not to hurt” Phineas’s feelings, displaying a combination of physical strength and gentle kindness

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which completely captivates Phineas: “My heart cried after him with an irrepressible cry. What I said I do not remember, but it caused him to return” (15). This initially one-​sided relationship soon becomes one of mutual aid; John continues to offer Phineas physical assistance and emotional support, but in turn Phineas helps John to establish himself in the world. Not only Phineas’s advocacy but his disability is essential to John’s first steps on the ladder which leads to his eventual prosperity, since it is only because Phineas is too frail to take over the family business that his father looks to John for an heir. Phineas also performs a less tangible service for John, aiding him in his quest to be recognised as a “gentleman” not only in terms of advancing his worldly position, but in terms of his developing his character. As Mary Klages points out, Phineas acts as “the object that can demonstrate and strengthen Halifax’s compassionate capacities…in order to establish that Halifax’s claim to gentility is based first and foremost on his inextinguishable reservoir of tenderness and fellow-​feeling” (67). As the opening scene suggests, Phineas’s need for care and John’s answering tenderness allay what Karen Bourrier identifies as “Victorian anxieties that the self-​made man is an uncaring social climber who is only interested in getting on in a narrowly material sense” (63). John’s relationship with Phineas can be understood as a kind of dry run for marriage, in which John is able to practise acting as a gentle man, before he becomes a “gentleman” and marries for real. As Phineas happily reflects when John shields him from being jostled by crowds when they visit the theatre together, “[i]‌f I had been a woman, and the woman that he loved, he could not have been more tender over my weakness” (65). As this formulation indicates, Phineas explicitly understands his disability as feminising, and he explains his own inability to marry primarily in these terms. Before stating that “one…stricken with hereditary disease, ought never to seek to perpetuate it by marriage”, he tells us that his “character was too feeble and womanish to be likely to win any woman’s reverence or love”, reiterating the distinction he has already made between his gender identity and John’s: “One June morning I woke to the consciousness that I was twenty years old, and that John Halifax was –​a man; the difference between us being precisely as I have expressed it” (52–​3). This assertion of his own femininity (or at least androgyny) might prompt the reader to wonder whether Phineas might in fact take the place of the heroine in the marriage plot, and their relationship become less a preparation than a substitute for marriage.The scenes in which John and Phineas exchange loving looks and silent embraces are certainly the most passionate in the book, and lead Talia Schaffer to think of their relationship as a “quasi-​marital partnership” and Holly Furneaux to see it as a source of “this novel’s queer creativity” (Schaffer 171, 117). At least one contemporary critic was perturbed by this aspect of Phineas’s characterisation: R. H. Hutton complained that “[d]‌uring the early part of the tale, it is difficult to suppress a fear that Phineas Fletcher will fall hopelessly in love with John Halifax, so hard is it to remember that Phineas is of the male sex” (475). As if anticipating exactly this “perplexity” (Hutton 475), however, Craik speedily provides John with a female love interest and marries him off before his twenty-​first birthday. Moreover, she puts Phineas’s femininity to work in the service of this marriage plot, having him act as mediator between taciturn John and his modest beloved, Ursula. Craik’s construction of ideal masculinity and femininity, personified by her hero and heroine, makes it surprisingly difficult for her to bring about a marriage between them. When they are thrown together in the same house, situations which should provide perfect opportunities for romance are repeatedly defused by John’s chivalrous determination not to embarrass Ursula, and her combination of naïve unconsciousness and perfect modesty. When Ursula does finally perceive the sexual tension between herself and John, she absents herself from his company, behaviour of which John wholeheartedly approves. Although it is ostensibly their inequality in social status which complicates their romance, the real source of the difficulty seems to be that Ursula 122

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is too womanly to encourage John to speak, and John too manly to do so; as Karen Bourrier puts it, “John’s tremendous self-​restraint threatens to bar him from the marriage plot precisely because he cannot step outside his manly taciturnity to woo his wife” (71). As a man who is at one point likened to “our own silent Severn” (225), John may have all the qualities of an ideal husband, but lacks the wherewithal to become one. Eventually, he falls into a decline, becoming literally love-​ sick, but since he is too stoical to make Ursula aware that he is ill, this is hardly helpful. Fortunately, John and Ursula have a matchmaking go-​between in Phineas, who, not sharing John’s commitment to gentlemanly silence, decides to save John’s life by going to see Ursula and telling her of John’s feelings. Indeed, this may be the real purpose of John’s illness in plot terms: up until this point, Phineas has been keen to delay John’s marriage and so preserve the exclusivity of their relationship, but the prospect of losing John altogether drives him to promote the match. Ursula’s response to Phineas’s appeal is, characteristically, wordless, but her “deep, soft” blush (184) shows that she has understood, and by the end of the chapter, she is engaged to John. These inarticulate lovers, who “did not speak, but only clasped hands” (189), are scarcely more communicative after Phineas’s intervention:  John never does declare his love in so many words, while Ursula communicates her feelings simply by giving a “low, faint cry” on being told that he plans to emigrate (190). Craik seems to see this silence as a crucial part of their idealised relationship, in which John does not relax his reserve nor Ursula compromise her modesty, staging multiple scenes in which the couple separately refuse to articulate their feelings to others. She is able to bring their unspoken passion to a point from which it can be taken as read, however, only because she has in Phineas an interpreter, who as a “womanish” go-​between is capable of being more explicit than the ideally feminine Ursula and less restrained than the ideally masculine John. What Sally Mitchell identifies as the mediating role of the invalid narrator, who “bridges the separate spheres of woman and man” (47), turns out to make him as invaluable to the marriage plot as he is in making John the “Gentleman” of the novel’s title. In Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) –​another bestseller which made its author’s name –​a similar role is played by Charles Edmonstone, brother of the heroine Amy and cousin and close friend to the hero, Guy. Confined to the domestic sphere and feminised by invalidism, Charles has a weakness for impulsive speech, which he puts to good use when Guy is falsely accused of gambling and his relationship to Amy broken off. Guy is prevented by his code of honour from revealing the real reasons behind his actions; suffering from no such constraints, Charles is able to make enquiries. When he questions the marplot Philip about the accusations against Guy, he makes full use of the licence his ill health affords him: Philip could not set Charles down in his present state, and was obliged to submit to a cross-​examination, in which he showed no abatement of his natural acuteness, and unsparing as he always was, laid himself under no restraint at all. Philip was compelled to give a full history of his researches; and if he had afforded no triumph to Guy, Charles revenged him. (Yonge 206) Although Charles, unlike Phineas, is unable immediately to bring the lovers together, he does give voice to the reader’s hope for a happy ending to the temporarily thwarted marriage plot, and, when the lovers are reunited, provide them with opportunities to be together through chaperoning them. After Guy’s death, Charles becomes the widowed Amy’s life-​companion and guardian to her fatherless daughter, making himself, as Amy puts it, “ ‘of wonderful use to every one” ’  (463). 123

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Even busier in making himself “of wonderful use” is Wilkie Collins’s Ezra Jennings in The Moonstone (1868), the mixed-​race doctor’s assistant, who suffers from a painful “internal complaint” and consequent addiction to opium, and is, in his own words, one of those “ ‘men [who] are born with female constitutions’ ” (369). This description not only serves to highlight the romantic intensity of his feelings for the hero, Franklin Blake, but also indicates why he is able to right Franklin’s marred marriage plot when the bluff detective, Sergeant Cuff, cannot. Using his feminine sensitivity and receptiveness, Jennings manages to interpret the ramblings of the feverish Mr Candy, working out that Franklin was dosed with opium on the night when the moonstone was stolen. He then persuades Franklin to be drugged once more so he can re-​enact the theft, observed by witnesses. Like Phineas and (to a lesser extent) like Charles, Ezra brokers a marriage which will exclude himself, putting the very femininity which shuts him out of the marriage plot to work in the service of the marriageable but sadly inarticulate hero. A tragic twist on this plot line is offered by George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss (1860). Her disabled anti-​hero Philip Wakem, “half-​feminine in sensitiveness” (331), has much in common with Craik’s “womanish” Phineas Fletcher, and Karen Bourrier reads Philip’s mutually antagonistic relationship with athletic, unreflecting Tom Tulliver as a kind of writing-​back to Craik’s idealised portrayal of Phineas and John’s relationship (76). His relationship with Maggie, however, also revisits and reverses Craik’s plotting of Phineas and Ursula’s relationship. Rather than forming a passionate attachment to another man, and then promoting his marriage to the heroine –​as do Phineas, Charles and Ezra –​feminised Philip longs to be cast as the heroine’s lover himself, and takes advantage of what Phineas calls the “sisterly trust and sisterly kindness” (Craik 131)  with which she treats him, as a man beyond the pale of ordinary propriety, in order to make love to her. The tragedy of Philip’s position, as Eliot portrays it, is that although he is uniquely capable of sympathising with our frustrated heroine, because as a disabled man he shares so many of her experiences as a woman in patriarchal society, he is totally unable to awaken her sexual desire, on account of the very disability that makes them in other ways so compatible. Maggie’s inability to feel desire towards Philip is repeatedly linked to his physical frailty and associated femininity, for example when she “stoop[s]‌her tall head to kiss the pale face that was full of pleading, timid love –​like a woman’s”, and is conscious of “sacrifice” rather than ecstasy (Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 337). She is disastrously drawn instead to the handsome, able-​bodied Stephen Guest. There is no mystery as to his appeal, which is shown to be rooted in the “strength” of his “firm arm”, a kind of strength which, the narrator tells us, is “strangely winning to most women…meet[ing] a continual want of the imagination” (408). What makes The Mill on the Floss so powerfully painful is that Maggie’s “natural” desire for handsome Stephen pulls her away from the “ ‘pity and faithfulness and memory’ ” which Maggie herself insists “ ‘are natural too’ ” (457). Committed to Christian ethics but living in a modern world governed not by Providence but by the laws of natural selection, Maggie is torn between these two senses of the “natural”. Our wish that it were possible for her to love Philip is made inextricable from our wish for a return to a world of happy endings, in which realist and providential plotting did not pull away from one another. Eliot’s recasting of the queer go-​between as a tragic figure enables him to embody her tragic sense of reality: this rebellious queer go-between plays as essential a role through his complication of his novel’s marriage plot as Phineas, Charles and Ezra play through facilitating the marriage plots of theirs.

The healing storyteller The figure of the healing storyteller has much in common with the queer go-​between, but their power to aid others’ marriage plots is rooted less in the fluidity of their gender identity than in 124

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their superior powers of naming and narration, which are linked to their disability. Dickens’s Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1865), for example, is depicted as enjoying privileged access to an imaginative realm through her experience of chronic pain. As “ ‘a little child’ ” unable to play with other children, Jenny recounts how she used to “ ‘see’ ” children “ ‘in white dresses… in long bright slanting rows…[who] swept about me and took me up and made me light’ ” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 239). She is still “ecstatic” when she remembers these visions, and her powers of imagination have not waned: she now “ ‘smell[s]‌flowers’ ” as she works, although as she says, “ ‘this is not a flowery neighbourhood’ ” (239). Jenny is not merely a fantasist, however; the sustenance she draws from these moments of imaginative escape and transformation enable her to face the reality of her circumstances, and to name them. She names her father, for example, her “child” –​usually her “ ‘troublesome bad child’ ” (240) –​in order to call attention to the reversal of their roles. Where Dickens’s other abused daughters, from Agnes Wickfield to Little Dorrit, suffer parental neglect and abuse in silence, Jenny forces others to acknowledge the reality of her relationship with her alcoholic, dependent father, whom she financially supports and attempts to care for, by the name she gives him. She also names herself, both “bestow[ing] upon herself the appellation of Jenny Wren”, a character associated in nursery rhyme with both sickness and with healing, and that of “ ‘the person of the house’ ”, making clear her entitlement to respect as the breadwinner and head of the household (333, 222). Jenny’s power of storytelling is such that she sometimes seems a kind of avatar for her author himself; as Hilary Schor points out, “she fictionalises in much the way Dickens does…Like Dickens, she turns horror into comic relief and unexpected blessing” (201). This power of naming enables Jenny to rescue Lizzie Hexham from the prospect of ruin or heartbreak, rewriting what seems to be the seduction narrative of her relationship with the middle-​class Eugene Wrayburn as a marriage plot. Jenny has already used her powers as a storyteller to draw from Lizzie a confession of her love for Eugene, persuading Lizzie to imagine herself in the position of a wealthy lady so that she is free to articulate her heart’s desire (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 349). As Helena Michie observes, Jenny perceives “both pain and desire in Lizzie”, and in enabling her to tell her story in fantastic form, “begins to construct a self, a ‘lady,’ a ‘wife,’ for her at their intersection” (211). Jenny’s own experience of physical pain enables her both to sympathise with Lizzie’s sorrow, and to alleviate it through her hyper-​effective nursing of Eugene when he lies at death’s door after being attacked by his jealous rival for Lizzie’s hand. Because he remembers her ability to transcend physical pain through “fancy”, Eugene sends for Jenny, and her unparalleled sensitivity and intuitiveness as a nurse enable her to act “as an interpreter between this sentient world and the insensible man” (737, 739). While half-​conscious, Eugene keeps repeating “one word, Lizzie…in a hurried and impatient manner, with the misery of a disturbed mind”; as he comes to, apparently feeling himself on the point of death, he begs his friend Lightwood to “ ‘[h]‌old [him] here…Stop [him] wandering away’ ” (240). Lightwood desperately appeals to Jenny to “ ‘only give [him] the right word!’ ”, which she duly does. The word, it transpires, is “wife”. By naming Eugene’s unnamed desire as the desire to marry Lizzie, rather than seduce her, Jenny effectively authors their marriage plot: Eugene seizes on the idea, marries Lizzie and duly recovers. In this whispered exchange we are, as Melissa Free explains, shown Jenny in the act of “transforming the working girl into a lady and wife –​and in so doing sacrificing her beloved Lizzie to Eugene” (269). As Free highlights here, Jenny suffers considerable loss in authoring Lizzie’s marriage plot. Throughout the novel, Jenny has fantasised about a future husband who would take Lizzie’s place as her companion and assistant, whilst lamenting his inevitable inferiority to Lizzie herself; when she is supplied with a love interest in the physically strong but slow-​witted Sloppy, both her fantasy and her fear seem to be realised. Yet if there is an element of loss in Jenny’s 125

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narrative trajectory, and if she is forced to some extent to work against her own interests, she is yet a powerful figure, able to take up more space as the “person of the house” and author of her own story than many of Dickens’s female characters are allowed. In her self-​assertiveness and sharp wit, she resembles Anthony Trollope’s Madeline Neroni in Barchester Towers (1857) –​a very different kind of character, but one who also uses her power as a storyteller in the service of the marriage plot. The once excessively mobile Madeline chooses never to appear in public except recumbent on her couch, after the husband she had “no alternative” but to marry has caused irreparable injury to one of her legs through his “violence” (Trollope 75–​6). A  fallen woman in both senses, Madeline is anything but repentant, arriving in Barchester determined “to have parsons at her feet” (86). She successfully uses her powers as a storyteller to mesmerise the clergymen of Barchester, inviting them to sit on the corner of her sofa and hear her “ ‘sad story’ ” (98). Through these performances, Madeline effectively overwrites her identity as a fallen woman –​ what her arch-​enemy Mrs Proudie calls “ ‘an intriguing Italian woman, half wife and half not!’ ” (104)  –​with her disabled identity, casting herself as the helpless, angelic invalid familiar to readers from other novels. Like Jenny, Madeline names herself (“How she had come to concoct such a name for herself it would be difficult to explain”) and does this so successfully that the Bishop takes her for a visiting noblewoman rather than “the daughter of one of his own prebendaries” (77, 101). Also like Jenny, she shows up the pretensions of the upstart men she encounters, most notably the oleaginous Obadiah Slope. Enjoyably subversive as Madeline’s storytelling is, however, she ultimately uses her narrative powers in the service of the marriage plot, bringing together sweet Eleanor Bold and worthy Mr Arabin, interpreting their motives to one another and inspiring each, respectively, to make and to accept a proposal of marriage. In her dealings with both of them, she claims the privileges of an invalid in speaking freely on ordinarily taboo subjects, and uses the patter she has perfected in telling her “sad story” to “soften” Eleanor up (206). Wilkie Collins creates a similarly likeable but considerably more wicked storyteller in his legless villain, Miserrimus Dexter, in The Law and the Lady (1875). I call him a villain because he works against the plot’s legitimate design, pretending to aid our detective heroine Valeria in her quest to clear her husband of suspicion of his first wife’s murder, and all the time concealing his knowledge of what really happened because he wants the hapless Eustace to suffer. However, the reader is not encouraged to feel any straightforward kind of antipathy towards Miserrimus. Certainly, his disability is sensationalised in such a way that he is made to seem both more and less than human, his leglessness a kind of monstrosity and his wheelchair use terrifying, rendering him a “fantastic and frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one –​the new Centaur, half man, half chair” (206).Yet the mischievous pleasure he takes in his power to shock others makes him the most entertaining character in the novel. In the scene just quoted, he is amusing himself by a private theatrical performance, in which he casts himself as great characters from history, and once he is aware of Valeria’s interest in him, his performances only become more extraordinary. Whenever he receives Valeria at his gothic mansion, which he has effectively turned into a theatrical set, furnishing it with the tanned skin of a French marquis and a (literal) skeleton in the closet, among other curiosities, he holds her rapt with the stories he tells, and what Valeria’s censorious mother-​in-​law calls the “show [he makes] of himself ” (218). In addition to the entertainment they offer both heroine and reader, these performances also amount to a commentary on Valeria’s own struggles and the unspoken injustices of the marriage plot she has entered into. Dressed in pink silk, adorned with bracelets and skilfully practising the arts of embroidery and gourmet cookery, Miserrimus refuses to abide by the gendered code of behaviour which assertive Valeria struggles to live by. In his exaggerated 126

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claims of male superiority, he holds up a mirror to the absurdity of Valeria’s own determination to keep up the fiction of her weak-​willed husband Eustace’s authority over her, and in his passionate admiration for Eustace’s supposedly ugly first wife, he challenges the supposed objectivity of the beauty standards to which Valeria clings. In his passionate overtures to Valeria herself, Miserrimus can be read as upending the expectations attached not only to the role of the healing storyteller, but also to that of the queer go-​between: having subverted gender codes with his choice of feminine costume, adornment and leisure activities, he then aggressively acts on the heterosexual desires the queer disabled character is assumed to be without, and works against the marriage plot he is expected to promote. In the end, Miserrimus falls silent whilst he is trying to tell one last story, a narrative in which his love for Eustace’s first wife was returned rather than unrequited, in which she was murdered by her perfidious maid rather than committing suicide because Miserrimus showed her the diary in which Eustace expressed his aversion towards her, and in which he himself is guiltless of her death. Miserrimus never gets to the end of this final story, struck dumb by the “latent insanity” which Valeria sees as his “Nemesis” (281, 346). Yet he does succeed, I think, in tempering our satisfaction at Valeria’s success in solving the mystery and righting her derailed marriage plot. The vividness with which he has communicated his love for the first Mrs Macallan makes it difficult for us to take unalloyed pleasure in the triumph of the second, so that when Valeria weeps at the novel’s ending, thinking of “those other wives” less fortunate than herself, we are bound to think of Miserrimus’s beloved Sara, the less-​loved first wife of the graceless Eustace (399). Right up to the point when he loses his mind, Miserrimus tries to exert control over the narrative, and although he fails in this, he does succeed in providing a kind of counter-​narrative, which is sufficiently compelling to prevent either Valeria or the reader from fully assenting to the narrative order restored by the novel’s conclusion.

The angel with a legacy In this paradigm, the selflessness, generosity and spirituality imputed to the invalid approaching death is used to facilitate the marriage of the surviving hero and heroine. The angel with a legacy typically gifts the able-​bodied characters whatever they need to marry, in material, moral or narrative terms, and then clears the stage by dying. Dickens’s Smike in Nicholas Nickleby (1838), for example, effectively prepares Nicholas for his eventual marriage to Madeline Bray by acting as the wife-​substitute who develops his emotional sensitivity and capacity for tenderness and care, but at the point when he might impede the neat conclusion of both Nicholas and Kate Nickleby’s marriage plots (by getting in Nicholas’s way, and being in love with Kate himself, respectively), he helpfully succumbs to consumption and dies. Moreover, Smike’s death proves the undoing of his villainous father, Ralph, who commits suicide when he learns that his son did not die in childhood but endured years of suffering at the hands of his own accomplice, Squeers, and is now beyond the reach of restitution. In a sense, Ralph’s destruction is Smike’s last gift to his beloved Nicholas, and one which definitively clears his hitherto much-​obstructed path to marriage. Thinking of Smike as an angel with a legacy draws attention to the narrative work performed by this apparently passive character, alerting us to the ways that his neediness and his frailty actually help Nicholas to achieve the marriage and maturity that, together, mark the successful conclusion of his Bildungsroman. A very different character who performs a strikingly similar plot role is Charlotte Yonge’s Felix Underwood in The Pillars of the House (1873). His convenient contraction of consumption clears the way for his brother Lancelot’s marriage plot: Gertrude Underwood is too much taken with the perfections of Felix ever to notice the charms of his 127

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more prosaic younger brother until after Felix’s death, when she transfers her affections to Lancelot, whose happiness therefore seems a legacy from his ever-​beneficent eldest brother. Competent Felix is unlike Smike in every way, except for the fact that his frail body ultimately functions as the sign of his otherworldliness, and his timely departure from a world he seems too good for smooths the way for his beloved companion’s marital happiness. George Eliot engages with this paradigm in an especially fascinating way in her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), which contains a pair of terminally ill characters who relate to their plot role as angels with legacies in diametrically opposing ways. Her visionary, consumptive Mordecai plays the role of disabled angel with a legacy to perfection: his death is made coextensive with the hero’s marriage to the heroine (his sister Mirah), while his terminal illness is the necessary condition for Daniel’s inheritance of his epic mission to lead the Jewish people to their homeland. It is because Mordecai is terminally ill that he seeks what he calls “a more-​ executive self ” to fulfil his Zionist mission, “a man who would have all the elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in an embodiment unlike his own” (405–​6). Until he meets Mordecai, Daniel has all the qualities needed by a novelistic hero –​he is handsome, able, wealthy and good –​but has not yet found a plot in which he can star; as the narrator tells us, his “too reflective and diffusive sympathy was in danger of paralysing him in that indignation against wrong and that selectness of fellowship which are the conditions of moral force”, so that “what he longed for was either some external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a definite line of action, and compress his wandering energy” (308). The longed-​for “external event” is provided by his meeting with Mordecai, whose “yearning for transmission” (405) is in turn answered by his meeting with Daniel, who is, as Oliver Lovesey points out, “recognized as Mordecai’s executive self partly as he represents a eugenicist’s ideal” (509). Although good health may be the last thing anyone remembers about Daniel, it is in fact a vital qualification for his newfound role as Mordecai’s spiritual heir. Daniel’s marriage to Mirah is a similarly forgettable aspect of Daniel Deronda: mention of the marriage plot in relation to this novel is more likely to conjure Gwendolen’s memorably miserable marriage to Grandcourt, or her dreadful disappointment when she realises that Daniel is not going to ask her to marry him, and stretches out her arms with the “smothered” cry “ ‘I am forsaken!’ ” (690).Yet Daniel’s marriage to Mirah is an essential part of his assumption of the role of Jewish patriarch and leader; with the ideally feminine, deeply pious and spotlessly pure (in both moral and racial senses) Mirah by his side, he will truly be “the grandson [his grandfather] wanted” (568), transmitting his intellectual, spiritual and ethnic inheritance to the next generation of Derondas through his (presumably fruitful) marriage to the perfect Jewish wife. Although Daniel meets Mirah before Mordecai, he feels unable to declare his feelings while she is dependent upon him; it is not until she is restored to her brother’s care that he is able to propose to her, and their shared relationship with Mordecai sets the seal on their relationship.Their marriage, in fact, is more likely to strike the reader as the physical manifestation of Daniel’s spiritual union with Mordecai, what Mordecai calls “ ‘the marriage of [their] souls’ ” (643), than a consummation devoutly to be wished for its own sake. The passion that throbs through the novel’s final chapter arises not from Daniel and Mirah’s desire to be together, which is formally recognised in their wedding, but from Mordecai’s desire to leave his own soul to Daniel as a kind of spiritual inheritance, a desire that is realised as he dies on the last page of the novel: “Death is coming to me as the divine kiss which is both parting and reunion –​which takes me from your bodily eyes and gives me full presence in your soul.Where though goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it not begun? Have I not breathed my soul into you? We shall live together.” (695) 128

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Mordecai treats his own soul, here, as something he can gift to Daniel, along with the role of Zionist leader. Both these gifts are dependent upon his own death, and so, too, is Daniel’s unencumbered journey to the East to start a new life with Mirah. To put it bluntly, the novel needs Mordecai to die, so that Daniel can come into his inheritance –​and, like a true angel with a legacy, Mordecai shows no resentment whatsoever at this state of affairs, longing for his own death so that Daniel can make a start. Eliot includes another disabled character in Daniel Deronda who plays an analogous role: Daniel’s mother, Leonora Alcharisi, who leaves Daniel what Mordecai calls “ ‘the sacred inheritance of the Jew’ ” (428) when she reveals his Jewish parentage and gives him the chest of books and papers which constitute his intellectual and spiritual inheritance. As Daniel gratefully tells her, she has “ ‘restored [him] to [his] inheritance’ ” (567) –​and also, of course, made possible his marriage plot, since Mirah has made it clear that she will never marry outside the Jewish faith.Yet Leonora rails against her part in leaving Daniel this legacy, explaining that she does not “ ‘consent’ ” but only “ ‘obey[s]‌something tyrannic’ ” (541). She plays the role of legator against her deepest wishes, and only because she has been weakened by physical illness to the point that she can no longer resist her father’s spirit. As she explains to Daniel: “ ‘it is as if the life I have chosen to live, all thoughts, all will, forsook me and left me alone in spots of memory, and I can’t get away: my pain seems to keep me there…when my strength goes, some other right forces itself upon me like iron in an inexorable hand’ ” (545). Whereas for Mordecai the spiritual porousness which makes him a conduit for Daniel’s spiritual inheritance is the ultimate compensation for bodily suffering and imminent death, for Leonora it represents a nightmarish defeat of her will; she has become, she laments, the “ ‘makeshift link’ ” her father always wanted to make her in a chain of inheritance (541). Unlike Mordecai, Leonora has no wish to lose herself in the wider current of her people’s national destiny: all her life, she tells Daniel, she has wanted “ ‘to live out the life that was in [her], and not to be hampered by other lives’ ” (536–​7). Although disability forces Leonora to acquiesce to her role in the epic plot of her people’s national destiny, she resists this role to the last, voicing a memorable protest against the use the novel’s plot makes of her. When Henry James revisited the plots of Daniel Deronda in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), he would collapse together the figures of Mordecai and Leonora in his consumptive legator Ralph Touchett, a character whose material legacy to the heroine has mixed motives and disastrous results, and yet whose moral legacy, imparted on his deathbed –​“ ‘if you’ve been hated you’ve also been loved’ ” (569) –​proves redemptive. The figure of the angel with a legacy re-​emerges in his late phase in the figure of Milly Theale, the terminally ill heiress whose fortune proves an irresistible temptation to those around her, who attempt to wrest it from her rather than passively waiting for her to leave it to them after her death. Whether the legacy she eventually leaves Merton Densher, in spite of his perfidy, is still charged with redemptive power, is a question that readers of The Wings of the Dove (1902) must, painfully, decide for themselves. The uncertain success of the disability plot provides a fittingly ambiguous ending to this proto-​ modernist novel in which Victorian plots, like Milly herself, are powerfully attractive, but seem unable to survive in the modern world.

Conclusion An essay of this length is necessarily suggestive, rather than exhaustive, and I have sketched here only a few of the ways in which disabled characters relate to the marriage plot in Victorian novels. My hope, however, is that even an excursion as brief as this one across the field of Victorian fiction, plotting disabled characters in relation to particular plot lines, makes visible 129

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the vital part they play in keeping the wheels of plot turning. When we can clearly see the dependence of able-​bodied characters on the work performed by their disabled companions, the absurdity of attributing disability in the dictionary’s second sense of the word (“an inability to function”) to those who are “disabled” in the first (“having a physical or mental condition which limits activity, movement, sensations, etc.”), becomes evident (“Disabled, Adj. and N.”). As the space between these two senses of the word “disability” is revealed as a yawning gulf, my hope is that, as readers, we will become ever more attuned to the work being done by disabled characters and by the dis/​ability system itself, and thereby become ever more sceptical of its distorting categories, and ever more alive to the contradictions, the complexities and the capabilities that it works to conceal.

Notes 1 A reference to Edward Bulwer-​Lytton’s 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii, in which the blind Nydia is driven to suicide by the pain of unrequited love. 2 For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Martha Stoddard Holmes,“Marital Melodramas: Disabled Women and Victorian Marriage Plots”, Fictions of Affliction, pp. 34–​72.

Works cited Bourrier, Karen. The Measure of Manliness:  Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-​ Victorian Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Bulwer-​Lytton, Edward. The Last Days of Pompeii. London: Richard Bentley, 1834. Collins, Wilkie. The Law and the Lady. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. —​—​—​. The Moonstone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock. John Halifax, Gentleman. Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005. Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. —​—​—​. Nicholas Nickleby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. “Disabled, Adj. and N.”. OED Online. Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 4 October 2019. Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. —​—​—​. The Mill on the Floss. New ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Free, Melissa. “Freaks That Matter:  The Doll’s Dressmaker, the Doctor’s Assistant, and the Limits of Difference”. Victorian Freaks:  The Social Context of Freakery in Britain. Ed. Marlene Tromp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008, 259–​82. Furneaux, Holly. “Negotiating the Gentle-​Man: Male Nursing and Class Conflict in the ‘High’Victorian Period”. Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-​Century Literature. Ed. Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 109–​25. Holmes, Martha Stoddard. “Marital Melodramas: Disabled Women and Victorian Marriage Plots”. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004, 34–​72. Hutton, Richard Holt. “Novels by the Authoress of ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’”. North British Review 29.58 (1858): 466–​81. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. —​—​—​. The Wings of the Dove. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Klages, Mary. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Lovesey, Oliver. “The Other Woman in ‘Daniel Deronda’”. Studies in the Novel 30.4 (1998): 505–​20. Michie, Helena. “‘Who Is This in Pain?’: Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in ‘Bleak House’ and ‘Our Mutual Friend’”. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.2 (1989): 199–​212. Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. “Poor Miss Finch”. Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 33.853 (1872): 282–​3. Schaffer, Talia. Romance’s Rival:  Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2016.

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Disability and the marriage plot Schor, Hilary M. Dickens and the Daughter of the House. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Woloch, Alex. The One Vs. the Many:  Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Yonge, Charlotte M. The Heir of Redclyffe. London: Macmillan, 1888.

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11 AFRO-​MODERNISM AND BLACK DISABILITY STUDIES Jess Waggoner

Introduction Afro-​modernism, as a broader and more geographically and temporally expansive alternative to “the Harlem Renaissance,” can be understood as black experimental artistic protest of Jim Crow-​era segregation logics. Housing, employment, and educational segregation and discrimination are among the innumerable inequities addressed by Afro-​modernism. However, scholarship frequently overlooks protests against eugenic thought and Jim Crow medical segregation and the ways in which this influenced Afro-​modernist engagements with disability and illness. This chapter will first provide historical background on the relationship between blackness and disability before the mid-​century, and then turn to Langston Hughes’s short story collection The Ways of White Folks (1934) to discuss the myriad ways Afro-​modernist authors represented and interrogated disability. I close with a brief discussion of Afro-​modernist artistic engagements with psychiatric reform.1 From some perspectives, Afro-​modernism was an artistic and cultural demonstration of black value that countered assertions of black civic unfitness. However, while W.E.B. Du Bois and his contemporaries focused on the necessity of uplift as anti-​racist discourse, authors such as Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston used their artistic production to trouble the imperatives of respectability politics, in part by offering humanizing accounts of black disability, illness, sexuality, and poverty (Waggoner 508). Heeding Christopher Bell’s call to end the reign of “white disability studies,” black disability studies turns to the eras of enslavement and eugenics to account for the present absence of disability in black cultural production. Disability historian Douglas Baynton argues that “disability arguments” were frequently used as “justifications of slavery…and of other forms of unequal relations between white and black Americans after slavery’s demise” (37). This resulted in what Jennifer James identifies as a pervasive “desire to enact ‘damage control’ by policing and correcting politically detrimental representations of blackness” (137). If the attribution of disability to black bodies and minds became a justification for violence, then the task of black leaders was to disentangle blackness and disablement and render blackness as healthy, productive, and deserving of civic inclusion. While some leaders rejected the ways in which blackness had become analogous with disability, others such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Elmer Carter, and Kelly Miller maintained a eugenic belief in degeneracy across white and black populations. In the June 1932 132

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issue of Birth Control Review, for example, Miller and Carter evoked an ill, degenerate “underclass” that placed the achievements of the black elite into high relief (Du Bois, “Black Folk and Birth Control,” 169–​173). This underclass, some argued, existed in both black and white communities. Many Afro-​ modernists adopted similar modes of eugenic thought to render dysgenic whiteness.The white, mentally disabled, and violent Earl in Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); the wealthy, blind Mrs. Dalton in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940); and, as I will explore here, the black and white disability woven throughout Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks –​all testify to the powerful hold of eugenic thought and its perceived ability to be used as what I have termed elsewhere “eugenic anti-​racism” (Waggoner 509).

Medical segregation Despite the discourses that encouraged African Americans to create distance from disability’s connotations of civic unfitness, the social realities of violence, trauma, and health disparities within African American communities generated a parallel discourse that urgently drove leaders and artists to address these issues. In a 1902 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du Bois points to the educational and professional gaps that keep African Americans from accessing basic needs: In the professions, college men are…healing and preventing the devastations of disease…All this is needful work. Who would do it if Negroes did not? How could Negroes do it if they were not trained carefully for it? If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?” (295) Du Bois sought change from the “higher training” of the middle and upper classes. At times in his early career he was inclined to see the lower classes –​not taking precautions against illness and using folk methods for healing instead of official medical care –​as a partial engine of the continued health disparities that he believed trained black doctors would assuage. The hesitancy to seek medical care and its frequent economic and geographical impossibility was spurred by years of medical distrust (cf. Washington and Smith). Instances such as the proliferation of scientific racism as a means of justifying enslavement, painful procedures enforced on black enslaved women by J. Marion Sims for early gynecological research, and the cruelty of the Tuskegee experiments all generated a justifiable black distrust of medical treatment and scientific research. While Zora Neale Hurston’s “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience” (1944) discusses her harrowing encounter with a whites-​only doctor’s office, Langston Hughes’s short essay “On Human Loneliness” (1944) describes a more abstract scene of human alienation incited by medical scenes of dentists’ and doctors’ offices. Hughes draws a comparison between the creeping dread inherent to the doctor’s office and the “death house in a great prison,” evoking a time when he visited the “Scottsboro boys…at Kilby prison in Alabama” (232). Although Hurston’s recounting of her medical abuse at the hands of a white doctor is more explicit in its protest of segregation, Hughes draws a comparison between the Jim Crow logics of young men awaiting death for a crime they didn’t commit with the isolation of the medical sphere. Folk medicine was one mode by which communities could resist medical abuse and alienation. While Hurston defended and preserved these practices, leaders such as Du Bois admonished users of folk medicine for their purported gullibility. Furthermore, those who did 133

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not seek what was deemed appropriate healthcare, or those who were perceived as performing incorrect hygiene practices or reproducing dysgenically, were blamed for perpetuating public health crises like tuberculosis. With diseases such as tuberculosis disproportionately affecting poorer African Americans at a higher rate, medical professionals and public health administrators debated whether this was due to an innate biological susceptibility or a demonstrable lack of proper health conditions and care. As Claudia Marie Calhoon writes, “municipal public health efforts often focused public attention on the black threat of contagion to the white community, perpetuating harmful stereotypes about African Americans” (102). Many activists and artists were aware that an increased awareness of how disease affected marginalized populations came with more surveillance, prejudice, and invasion.Yet, despite fears of reifying the pathologization of blackness, disability and illness featured prominently in Afro-​modernist work.

Caregiving and exploitation in Langston Hughes’s “Berry” Langston Hughes’s 1932 short story collection The Ways of White Folks primarily uses disability as a narrative device to portray white racism as a pervasive illness. However, instead of dismissing this device solely as “narrative prosthesis” (Mitchell and Snyder 53), we must investigate the underlying justifications for rendering whiteness itself as disabled in a variety of ways throughout Hughes’s collection. These disabilities and illnesses are frequently manifested as forms of white racial melancholia, where white existence is inextricably bound up in a dependence upon blackness (Cheng xi). Once blackness revolts, whiteness can no longer function. In “A Good Job Gone,” the narrator describes the downfall of his wealthy white employer, Mr. Lloyd, who falls in love with a black nightclub singer named Pauline. Lloyd is sent to a “sanitorium” after Pauline rejects him. “Red Headed Baby” follows a white sailor who returns to port after three years to discover that he has a deaf mixed-​race child. As in “Cora Unashamed,” in which Cora, a domestic worker, becomes attached to her white charge Jessie, a “stupid” and “plump, dull, freckled girl, placid and strange” (39), the following story, “Berry,” addresses not only the prevalence of underpaid black caregiving but also the possible intimacies between disability and blackness. The protagonist of “Berry,” a young black man named Milberry, is underpaid eight dollars a week to work at a summer living facility for white disabled children called “Dr. Renfield’s Summer Home for Crippled Children” (96). Milberry is eventually fired for accidentally breaking a child’s wheelchair. It is through Milberry’s perspective that we come to see the unsettling aspects of the home. He notices that [t]‌he Summer Home was run for profits from the care of permanently deformed children of middle class parents who couldn’t afford to pay too much, but who still paid well –​too well for what their children got in return. [He] saw the good cans opened for company, and the cheap cans opened for the kids. (100) Dr.  Renfield’s Summer Home for Crippled Children, built near the beach five miles from Jersey City, was possibly based on The Children’s Sea-​Shore House in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the “first pediatric rehabilitation hospital” in the United States that marketed the power of outdoor and marine-​based rehabilitation for convalescence. Milberry grows fond of the children under his charge and spends his spare moments playing with them on the beach: “Somehow, he thought he wouldn’t even stay there and work if it wasn’t for the kids. For the children grew terribly to like Milberry” (99). Milberry’s approach to 134

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the disabled residents lies somewhere between pity and identification. He senses there is “something phoney about the whole house –​except the little crippled kids there like himself because they couldn’t help it” (98). In this moment, instead of counter-​identifying with the disabled children who were sent to the home (against their own will, Hughes suggests), Milberry aligns himself with their conditions, realizing he is in part working at this home because he is unable to find better employment due to racism, and “had been hungry for weeks” (98). While the adult workers at the institution “only spoke to him when they had some job for him to do, or when they were kidding him about being dark, and talking flat and Southern, and mispronouncing words,” he found community with the disabled children who “didn’t care how he talked. They loved his songs and his stories” (99). On his final day at the home, Milberry helps take the children down to the beach: “But when Berry started to push the chair down from the porch to the walk, the child, through excess of joy, suddenly leaned forward laughing, and suddenly lost his balance. Berry saw that he was going to fall. To try to catch the boy, the young Negro let the chair go. But quick as a wink, the child had fallen one way onto the lawn, the chair the other onto the cement walk” (100–​101). Although the boy still clung to Berry after his fall and was ultimately uninjured, Berry is fired and his last week’s wages are deducted for the broken wheelchair. Disability theorist Akemi Nishida has addressed the economic exploitation and emotional labor that can underlie a caregiving relationship, and urges us to acknowledge the bidirectional oppression that can arise. Nishida notes that “affective relationality –​the bond –​ is part of what keeps care providers returning to exploitative care work and has them filling the gap between what care industries provide and what care recipients need” (98). We see this “affective relationality” in “Berry”: Milberry was initially hired to solely work in the kitchen, but it is the additional emotional and physical labor of spending time with the children that ultimately leads to his loss of employment.

Black ill transience in Hughes’s “Home” While the majority of representations of illness and disability in The Ways of White Folks reference whiteness, the short story “Home” is an anomaly. “Home” is narrated from the perspective of Roy, a professional violinist who, upon contracting tuberculosis during his travels in Europe, returns to his native Missouri to die, only to be lynched for speaking with a white woman. Tuberculosis in “Home” adds increasing tension, dread, and discomfort, building the (eventually thwarted) expectation that the disease will kill the protagonist. Hughes’s short story is exemplary of Du Bois’s insistence that racism, rather than merely illness, disability, or lack of hygiene, is the most potent threat to black life. While living out his remaining days in Missouri, Roy gives a church concert and befriends a white elderly woman named Miss Reese who teaches music at the local high school. One evening, Roy takes a restless stroll through the town’s main street and encounters her. In a moment of mutual recognition of bodily vulnerability, Hughes writes, “They smiled at each other, the sick young colored man and the aging music teacher in the light of the main street” (28). Roy’s unfamiliarity with southern customs of segregation leads him to shake hands with Miss Reese, for which he is subsequently lynched by a mob of white bystanders. It is tempting to see disability as a metaphor for infectious white violence in this piece, especially as the scene of Roy’s death by lynching evokes symptoms of tuberculosis: “Roy looked up from the sidewalk at the white mob around him. His mouth was full of blood and his eyes burned. He knew he would never get home to his mother now” (29). However, I am interested in highlighting how Hughes places a rare emphasis on modern, black, ill subjectivity and provides a black illness narrative that reclaims the figure of the tubercular dandy genius for blackness. 135

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Roy arrives back in America in July of 1932, “on the day that Hoover drove the veterans out of Washington” (22). Upon returning to Hopkinsville from Berlin, Roy’s urbanity unsettles the color line in southern Missouri. As Hughes tracks Roy’s decision to return home to convalesce, he addresses the charge that tuberculosis fell upon urban black people as a punishment for their reckless migration to vice-​ridden urban areas. It was a common line of argument that “free” African Americans were more prone to disability and illness than enslaved people; this rhetoric sustained itself in future discourses by insinuating that migrating “northern” black people were more prone to debilitation than southern black people. This reasoning, as public health scholar Samuel Kelton Roberts notes, conveniently ignored the effects of Jim Crow on black health in the form of crowded conditions and a lack of access to medical care (5). After years playing in cities across Europe, Roy no longer “felt his color” and lives on a comfortable income (23). But this relief from racism is tempered by his disgust with the stark juxtaposition of poverty and wealth, “behind doors where tourists never passed, hunger and pain were beyond understanding. And the police were beating people who protested, stole or begged” (22). Kimberly Banks reads Roy’s homecoming as a death wish, suggesting that “in coming home maybe Roy sought the violence of the South rather than the impersonal violence of major cities” (462). Rather than perceiving Europe as the black modernist dream of colorblind artistic freedom, Roy compares Depression-​era Harlem with Berlin, Prague, and Vienna and concludes the world is “rotten everywhere” (Hughes 22). Yet a return to the rhythms of rural life, intended to restore health to the urban ill, hastens Roy’s demise. As a thoroughly modern black violinist, sartorially offensive to Missouri whites in his “suit and spats and…yellow gloves,” Roy translates what looks like an unfortunate forgetfulness of segregation into a refusal to be segregated (27). Throughout his illness and transition to Hopkinsville, Roy maintains his elegant dress, incorporating a cane “that he carried lately from weakness rather than from style” (27). The image of a displaced black tubercular dandy, inching through the streets of small-​town Missouri, is an altogether different vision from the urban vitality of Berlin or even Harlem. Roy’s sartorial presentation speaks to a complex classed, racialized, and gendered history. The black dandy was initially satirized in minstrelsy performance as “Zip Coon,” a figure that registered white anxieties about post-​emancipation black class and cultural mobility (Lott 138).The dandy was reclaimed and repurposed by figures such as Du Bois as the sensitive aesthete who had much to offer U.S. artistic exceptionalism, a manifestation of an American cultural nationalism that argued for black worth in order to appeal for citizenship. Monica Miller argues that the black dandy figure in Du Bois’s 1928 novel Dark Princess is “aware of, but not limited by blackface stereotype…fully participat[ing] in a modernist moment in which the performance removes the blackface taint from the art and the ridicule from the upwardly mobile, politically astute person” (159). In “Home,” Hughes also implements a “modernist moment” of re-​signifying the dandy, removing Roy from the cosmopolitanism where he developed his distinct style and placing him back in Missouri where he is perceived as arrogant (Miller 159). In a Du Boisian strain, contrasting the worldly Roy with the ignorance of the white townspeople argues for his relevance within what Du Bois famously called “the talented tenth,” particularly when Roy brings culture back to the town through his performance at the local church. But Hughes chooses instead to satirize this homecoming narrative and to invest in a differing politics of illness. As Susan Sontag writes in Illness as Metaphor (1978), The melancholy character  –​or the tubercular  –​was a superior one:  sensitive, creative, a being apart…the TB sufferer was a dropout, a wanderer in endless search of the

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healthy place. Starting in the early nineteenth century, TB became a new reason for exile, for a life that was mainly traveling. (32–​33) While Sontag emphasizes white and economically mobile experiences of tuberculosis, her piece usefully elucidates the characterization of white illness that Hughes draws upon and subverts. In his restless wanderings through Europe to Harlem and finally back to Missouri, Roy claims the crip transient figure for blackness. Rather than a metaphorical conflation of whiteness and “ill” conscience in Missouri, Hughes instead presents a truncated black illness narrative. The story is composed of six brief sections, four of which resemble chronological exposition, with the third and fifth sections implementing modernist psychological interiority by fully immersing the reader in Roy’s chaotic interior monologue. The fifth section opens with Roy playing a homecoming concert. Hughes writes the entire section in stream-​of-​consciousness to convey Roy’s feverishness and unease. After performing throughout Europe, playing his “first concert in America” in a church, while ill, to a segregated black and white audience, is entirely surreal to Roy. Hughes joins ill and modernist poetics here: And you, Mr. Brahms, singin’ out into the darkness, singin’ so strong and true that a thousand people look up at me like they do at Roland Hayes singing the Crucifixion. Jesus, I  dreamed like that before I  got sick and had to come home…  .This, my friends…I should say, Ladies and Gentlemen. (There are white folks in the audience who are not my friends.)…This is the Meditation from Thais by Massenet… .This is the broken heart of a dream come true not true. This is music and me, sitting on the door-​step on the world needing you… .O, body of life and love with black hands and brown limbs and white breasts and a golden face with lips like a violin bowed for singing… .Steady, Roy! It’s hot in this crowded church, and you’re sick as hell… .This, the dream and the dreamer, wandering in the desert from Hopkinsville to Vienna in love with a streetwalker named Music… (25) Ill chronicity –​an unpredictable state that is composed of recurrences –​“alters the pace of time” for Roy in this passage (Gravendyk 15). This juxtaposition of Roy’s “sick as hell” state with rapid flashes of disjointed images and sound approaches what Hilary Gravendyk has coined a “chronic poetics,” in which an attention to “duration, chronicity, pain” takes the place of a poetics “imagined through a normative body” (2). Duration and chronicity are especially key to Hughes’s rendering of Roy’s experience; this elliptical passage articulates how throughout his performance Roy both dips into the delirium of illness and resurfaces, alternately stretching and hastening the experience of time. The reader does not experience his performance or even its effect on the audience, but rather the nonlinear strand of thoughts that emerge during the performance and his relapse into tuberculosis symptoms. In this way, Hughes drives home the black modernist melancholy of displacement through the manipulation of white-​identified musical form. This is similarly reflected in how the tubercular white dandy is re-​homed in Roy. In a 1934 letter to Hughes, while dying of tuberculosis himself, Wallace Thurman satirizes the aggrandizement of white ill genius and romanticizations of the illness, quipping, “Yes, at last I’m a genius. I have T.B.” Echoing Thurman’s ironization in narrative form, Hughes situates Roy as the tubercular black genius and troubles the color line of artistic brilliance and illness. By narrating his unexpected death at the hands of white southerners rather than tuberculosis alone, Hughes reverses the trope of the black dandy’s foolhardy venture into the territory of

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modernity reserved for whites. In treating Roy’s illness as a social reality, rather than solely using illness as metaphor, Hughes demonstrates that one can be black, ill, and modern.2

Psychiatric reform To conclude, this chapter will turn to the ways in which Afro-​modernism responded to the climate surrounding psychiatric disability and psychiatric reform before the mid-​century. In the 1940s U.S., psychiatric and institutional reform was initially incited by concern for discharged white male veterans, with less attention afforded to disabled civilians, especially disabled people of color. In response, conscientious objectors forced to work in asylums exposed the harrowing conditions of institutionalized people and Mary Jane Ward’s 1946 novel The Snake Pit directed attention toward white women and their wrongful institutionalization for gendered psychiatric disabilities. In a climate of psychiatric reform that neglected people of color, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright were generating greater awareness of black mental health with their writings about Harlem’s newly-​opened LaFargue clinic, an intrepid low-​cost psychiatric clinic established in 1946 under the direction of white psychologist Fredric Wertham. That same year, Wright published “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem,” a short piece in support of the opening of the Lafargue Clinic. Wright joins his interest in psychiatry with a materialist critique of the uneasy marriage of health care and capitalism, arguing that “[i]‌t would be far easier to confiscate private property than to violate, under however laudable a pretext, the contemporary metaphysical canons of organized medicine in America” (49). Two years later, Ellison also wrote in support of the clinic in “Harlem is Nowhere,” a photo-​ essay that was ultimately not published until 1964. Influenced by psychoanalysis and the rise of social psychiatry, both Wright and Ellison articulate a post-​Depression black modernism predicated on the loss of community, religion, and mental health, and delineate their intimate ties to a broken dream of citizenship recognition that was supposed to be enhanced by black civic participation in World War II.3 In the place of such citizenship, Ellison paints Harlem as “nowhere.” Ellison describes a postwar malaise settling in Harlem that cannot be lifted until the African American is no longer a “ ‘displaced person’ of American democracy” (57). In response to this displacement, Ellison argues, the black man “has developed these techniques of survival to which Faulkner refers to as ‘endurance,’ and an ease of movement within explosive situations which makes Hemingway’s definition of courage, ‘grace under pressure,’ appear mere swagger” (55). Long before critiques of masculinity in Hemingway’s work emerged in modernist scholarship, Ellison lampoons the “white man against a changing world” ethos that characterized much of U.S. modernist production, showing the need for more than mere “courage” or “endurance” to ensure black survival. However, the emerging visibility around mental health that was afforded to veterans, white women, and black men were in some ways predicated upon the gaps and silences surrounding black women and psychiatric disability. Future scholarship on Afro-​modernism and psychiatric disability would benefit from a sustained consideration of black women’s psychological states in works by authors such as Marita Bonner, Anne Petry, and Nella Larsen.

Conclusion Julie Minich argues that “[t]‌here is…an enormous body of scholarly and activist work that has until recently gone unrecognized by disability scholars as critical disability studies, despite advocating a radical politics of corporeal variation and neurodiversity: [including] protests against 138

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racialized disparities in health.” If modernism is defined by a sense of loss, disenfranchisement, and religious, familial, and community alienation, these experiences were ongoing for black Americans in the twentieth century. Therefore, a definition of modernism that ends with the optimism of the postwar moment is a modernism that ignores the anomie accelerated by racial alienation and in part spurred by continued health inequities.This has implications not only for modernist methodologies but also for the approaches of critical disability studies. Despite the centrality of protesting health inequities within African American cultural production, we have not fully registered their artistic value and contributions to Afro-​modernist thought. Conversely, critical disability studies has overlooked the value of health-​themed writings by people of color for the disability studies canon. Looking to works by Afro-​modernists such as Hughes, who used disability as a metaphorical critique of whiteness, reveals the power dynamics of underpaid caregiving and emotional labor in the Jim Crow era. Highlighting works from Wright, Ellison, and Hurston that were written from the depths of a racialized health crisis illuminates the continuity of these issues in recent history, from the Flint water crisis to the persistence of race-​based medicine in justifying the neglect of patients of color.

Notes 1 I draw my understanding of Afro-​modernism from Baker, Hutchinson, Stewart, Sanders, and Smethurst. For further reading in black disability studies, see Jarman, Schalk, Bell, Boster, Burch, Carmody, Pickens, Dudley, and Samuels (2011). 2 For more on Hughes and illness, see his poem “The Consumptive” in the February 1933 issue of The Crisis (31), as well as his poem “The Sick Room” in the 1939 edition of The Weary  Blues. 3 Gabriel Mendes has written extensively about this topic in his book Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry.

Works cited Baker, Houston A. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Banks, Kimberly. “‘Like a Violin for the Wind to Play’: Lyrical Approaches to Lynching by Hughes, Du Bois and Toomer.” African American Review 38.3 (2004): 451–​465. Baynton, Douglas. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” The New Disability History:  American Perspectives. Ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky. New  York:  New  York University Press, 2001, 33–​57. Bell, Christopher M., ed. Blackness and Disability:  Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011. Boster, Dea H. “‘I Made Up My Mind to Act Both Deaf and Dumb’: Displays of Disability and Slave Resistance in the Antebellum American South.” Disability and Passing:  Blurring the Lines of Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013, 82–​109. Burch, Susan. Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Calhoon, Claudia Marie. “Tuberculosis, Race, and the Delivery of Health Care in Harlem, 1922–​1939.” Radical History Review 80 (2001): 101–​119. Carmody, Todd. “In Spite of Handicaps: The Disability History of Racial Uplift.” American Literary History 27.1 (2015): 56–​78. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Black Folk and Birth Control.” Birth Control Review 16.7 (1932): 166–​167. —​—​—​. “Of the Training of Black Men.” Atlantic Monthly 90 (Sept. 1902): 289–​297. —​—​—​. Letter to Philip P. Jacobs. 13 Sept. 1928. MS.W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. —​—​—​. The Philadelphia Negro. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Dudley, Rachel.“Toward an Understanding of the ‘Medical Plantation’ as a Cultural Location of Disability.” Disability Studies Quarterly 32.4 (2012): n. pag. www.dsq-​sds.org. Web. March 18, 2015.

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Jess Waggoner Ellison, Ralph. “Harlem is Nowhere.” Harper’s Magazine (Aug. 1964): 53–​57. Gravendyk, Hillary. “Chronic Poetics.” Journal of Modern Literature 38.1 (2014): 1–​19. Hughes, Langston. “The Consumptive.” The Crisis 40 (Feb. 1933): 31. —​—​—​. “On Human Loneliness.” Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942–​62. Ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995, 231–​233. —​—​—​. “The Sick Room.” The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf, 1939. —​—​—​. The Ways of White Folks. 1934. Alexandria: Alexander Street Press, 2005. Hurston, Zora Neale. Go Gator and Muddy the Waters: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston for the Federal Writers’ Project. New York: Norton, 1999. —​—​—​. “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience.” I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … and Then Again When I  Am Looking Mean and Impressive:  A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. Ed. Alice Walker. Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1979, 163–​164. —​—​—​. Seraph on the Suwanee: A Novel. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Hutchinson, George. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. George Hutchinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. James, Jennifer. “Gwendolyn Brooks, World War II, and the Politics of Rehabilitation.” Feminist Disability Studies. Ed. Kim Q. Hall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011, 136–​158. Jarman, Michelle. “Dismembering the Lynch Mob: Intersecting Narratives of Disability, Race, and Sexual Menace.” Sex and Disability. Ed. Anna Mollow and Robert McRuer. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, 89–​107. Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York: Penguin, 1997. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Mendes, Gabriel N. Under the Strain of Color: Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic and the Promise of an Antiracist Psychiatry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Minich, Julie Avril. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now.” Lateral 5.1 (2016): n. pag. https://​ doi.org/​10.25158/​L5.1.9. Web. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Disclosure. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Nishida, Akemi. “Relating through Differences:  Disability, Affective Relationality, and the U.S. Public Healthcare Assemblage.” Subjectivity 10.1 (2017): 89–​103. Pickens, Therí A. “‘It’s a Jungle Out There’: Blackness and Disability in Monk.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.3 (2013): n. pag. www.dsq-​sds.org. Web. March 18, 2015. —​—​—​. “Octavia Butler and the Aesthetics of the Novel.” Hypatia 30.1 (2015):  167–​180. Web. March 18, 2015. Roberts, Samuel Kelton. Infectious Fear:  Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Samuels, Ellen. “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet.” Signs 37.1 (2011): 53–​81. —​—​—​. Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Print. Sanders, Mark. “American Modernism and the New Negro Renaissance.” The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism. Ed. Walter. Kalaidjian. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 129–​156. Schalk, Sami. “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night.’” African American Review 50.2 (2017): 139–​151. Smethurst, James. The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Smith, David Barton. Health Care Divided: Race and Healing a Nation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Stewart, Jeffrey C. “The New Negro as Citizen.” The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. George Hutchinson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 13–​27. Thurman, Wallace. Letter to Langston Hughes. 10 July 1934. The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III. New Brunswick:  Rutgers University Press, 2003, 130.

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Afro-modernism and disability studies Waggoner, Jess. “‘My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience’: Afro-​Modernist Critiques of Eugenics and Medical Segregation.” Modernism/​modernity 24.3 (2017): 507–​525. Ward, Mary Jane. The Snake Pit. New York: Random House, 1946. Washington, Harriet. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Harlem Moon, 2006. Wright, Richard. Native Son. Broomall: Chelsea House, 1996. —​—​—​. “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem.” Free World 12 (Sept. 1946): 49–​51.

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12 “WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HIM?” Intellectual disability, Jewishness, and stereotype in Bernard Malamud’s “Idiots First” Howard Sklar As in many of Bernard Malamud’s short stories, the characters in his 1961 “Idiots First” suffer from a double otherness, insofar as they are outsiders both to the Jewish community in which they live and to American society generally. While Malamud, as a Jewish American writer, frequently relies to a considerable extent on the use of stereotype as a shorthand for the otherness of the Jewish characters in his stories, this sensibility is compounded in the “idiot” figure of Isaac, whose intellectual disability estranges him even further from the norms of society. Indeed, the story reinforces discourses that have traditionally been applied to people with intellectual disabilities. Martin Halliwell, in his Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film (2004), suggests that, for many such characters, there is “an inner lack of coherence,” with the result that “idiot figures are often ‘open’ characters in process rather than fixed functions.” He points especially to “modernist and postmodernist writing in which characters are rarely stable entities:  sometimes fragmentary, sometimes incomplete, and sometimes discontinuous” (14). In this sense, Isaac, like many other intellectually disabled characters, is “transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence,” as Homi Bhabha describes this process, and this “partial” –​indeed, stereotypical –​quality complicates our spontaneous ethical response to his plight (86). Reading the story in relation to theories from postcolonial, Jewish, and disability studies, as well as short story theory, I will examine the ethical implications of the multiple layers of otherness enacted by Malamud’s story. I claim that the story simultaneously activates several ethical considerations: (1) the ethics of representing an Other –​in this case, an intellectually disabled Other; (2)  an ethical evaluation of the relations between characters, particularly between Isaac and his father, Mendel; and (3) a rhetorical ethics, as the narrative persuades readers to adopt a sympathetic stance towards the protagonists (see Sklar, Art of Sympathy; Phelan, 1–​24). These effects are made possible by the genre of the short story itself, both in terms of its need for compression or “intensification of structure” (May, The Short Story, 116) and its typical reliance on a moment of “epiphany” or “high emotional intensity” (Toolan, “Engagement via Emotional Heightening,” 213–​14) –​in this case, not for the characters but for us as readers. Thus, while the story reflects some of the prevailing assumptions about intellectual disability in society, I argue that, by engaging our ethical and emotional responses to Isaac’s plight, the narrative partially transcends the “prosthetic” function that many intellectually disabled characters tend to serve (Mitchell and Snyder, 8).

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A word on “intellectual disability” The term intellectual disability, like so many others that have been or are used (“mental retardation,” “cognitive impairment,” “developmental disability,” “learning disability,” “learning difficulty”), is problematic in terms of what it implies and what it leaves out. Intellectual disability as a category stresses particular –​that is to say, intellectual –​skills, at the expense of other forms of capability. It also implies the lack or significant impairment of that ability. In this sense, by using the term, one is oriented towards an individual’s intellectual incapacity, rather than the totality of the person. This is specifically what terms such as “learning difficulty” are meant to remedy, as Goodley and Rapley (229), for example, argue. At the same time, as I have elaborated elsewhere (Sklar, “Narrative Empowerment,” 145–​46; Sklar, “Reading Other Minds,” 236), the lack of specificity in such terms –​however much they may promote greater self-​esteem on the part of those who are labelled –​renders them in a descriptive sense almost meaningless. Since the primary challenge for this group of people is their cognitive difference, therefore, I have opted to use the terms “intellectual disability,” and “people with intellectual disabilities,” despite their limitations.

The story The events of “Idiots First” all take place on one evening, as an elderly father, apparently on the verge of death, tries to collect enough money to send his 39-​year-​old intellectually disabled son by train cross-​country to his 81-​year-​old brother (Malamud, “Idiots First,” 276, 280). The father, Mendel, drags the son, Isaac, from one potential source of financing to the next. He is refused any charity, first by an indifferent pawnbroker and then a pitiless wealthy scion of the community, with each asking about Isaac, “What’s the matter with him?” (274, 276). Finally, the local rabbi, against the strenuous objections of his wife, gives Mendel a new “fur-​lined caftan” coat (278–​79) that he can pawn for the funds that he needs. When Mendel has finally managed to scrape together enough money for the ticket and is on the verge of finally getting Isaac to the train on time, they are stopped at the gate by a mysterious character, Ginzburg, about whom Mendel warns his son at the beginning of the story, “Don’t talk to him or go with him if he asks you” (274). When they meet at the train station, it becomes apparent that Ginzburg is an emissary of the Angel of Death, as he tells Mendel, “You shoulda been dead already at midnight. I told you that yesterday. This is the best I can do” (279). Mendel asks Ginzburg, “Whatever business you in, where is your pity?” (280). When Ginzburg replies that “The law is the law” (280), Mendel tries one last entreaty, explaining, “For thirty-​nine years, since the day he was born, I wait for him to grow up, but he don’t. Do you understand what this means in a father’s heart? Why don’t you let him go to his uncle?” (280). Even this fails to persuade Ginzburg, so Mendel, desperate to get his son on the train, which still sits ready for departure just beyond the gate, attacks Ginzburg, and they wrestle violently in a scene reminiscent of the biblical encounter between Jacob and the Angel/​God/​a man (Genesis 32:22–​32). Although at one point during this fight Mendel thinks, “Now I die without helping Isaac” (280), in the end Ginzburg realizes that, instead of Mendel, it is he who will be taken by death, as we are told, “Ginzburg looked astounded. ‘Who me?’ ” (281). Ginzburg then relents and tells Mendel, “Go…take him to the train” (281), and the father settles Isaac on the train, even managing to give the conductor instructions about how to assist his son, before returning to the platform “to see what had become of Ginzburg” (281).

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Degrees of otherness As this synopsis suggests, the narrative is constructed in such a way as to readily induce our sympathy for the protagonist Mendel. His motive, to provide for his disabled son before he dies; his unselfish requests for assistance; the helpless tale of his difficulty in raising a son who has never “grown up”; the pitiless resistance to his pleas; the mounting desperation; even his concern for Ginzburg after he has accomplished his mission –​all of these direct readers to very quickly take Mendel’s side. The fact that Mendel’s devotion to his son is foregrounded in this compressed way, typical of the short story genre (May, “The Short Story’s Way of Meaning,” 176), provides a fairly decisive parameter, or “frame” (Winther) within which readers are guided to respond to the narrative (see more below). Even the title of the story –​like other Malamud story titles, highly significant to the story’s meaning (see Winther, 93–​96) –​suggests a particular ethical stance towards the protagonist and his so-​called “idiot” son: Mendel demonstrates that his son comes “first” through his desperate attempt to provide for him, even in the face of death. This sensibility is heightened during the tense and dramatic resolution of the story. That Mendel ultimately wrestles with and defeats Death, at least temporarily, and is able to help Isaac board the train on time, provides a moment of “epiphany” –​“a point of revelation, of showing forth, the place where everything is seen to fall together,” as short story theorist Mary Rohrberger puts it (12). This “distinguishing characteristic of the short story” (12) provides a form of release, not only for the characters themselves, but also, theoretically, for many readers. In order to distinguish between the represented experiences of characters and the theoretical responses of actual readers, short story theorist Michael Toolan distinguishes between epiphanies or “turning points” (Toolan, in Winther et al., “Dialogues,” 248), which “relate to the character’s assumed experience” (248, italics added), and “highly emotive and immersing” (HEI) passages (Toolan, “Engagement,” 212), which “negotiate…a point of greatest emotional and moral depth in the story for the reader” (Toolan, in Winther et al., “Dialogues,” 248, italics original). While any attempt to make broad claims about the responses of readers to a given story is naturally speculative, Toolan’s approach to the short story –​and my own, in reader response testing that I have conducted –​emphasizes the specific features within a narrative that hypothetically persuade readers to respond in particular ways (Sklar, Art of Sympathy, 89–​171; Sklar, “Narrative Structuring”). As noted above, this story provides a considerable amount of information about the relationship between Isaac and his father, along with the difficulty of their plight, early in the progression of the narrative. This concentration of detail at the beginning of the story creates what narrative theorist Meir Sternberg terms a strong “primacy effect” (Sternberg, 93–​98; see also Sklar, Art of Sympathy, 56–​59) –​a first impression so decisive that it is difficult to overturn, even by presenting subsequently negative or contrasting details (the “recency effect”; Sternberg, 93–​98; see also Sklar, Art of Sympathy, 56–​59). Beyond these structural features, the narrative provides additional contextual clues to its interpretation. For example, Mendel’s vulnerability until his eventual stay against death can be seen as fitting into the larger scheme of Malamud’s hapless protagonists in his early story collections The Magic Barrel (1970 [1958]) and Idiots First (1966 [1963]), nearly all of which demonstrate an almost life-​threatening social impotence or incompetence. As Robert Alter asserts, “Malamud’s symbolic Jews must be shlemiels, for…Malamud’s central metaphor for Jewishness is imprisonment, and even when no actual enclosing walls are present, his Jews remain manacled and hobbled to their own scapegrace ineptitude” (33). The shlemiel –​“a consistently unlucky or unfortunate person…a born loser” (Rosten, 344) –​certainly seems a plausible way of labeling the ineffective quality of the characters’ struggles against life and fate. That the term also often 144

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means “a foolish person; a simpleton” (344) makes the shlemiel designation particularly ironic, in light of the presence of Isaac. If nearly everyone is viewed, on some level, as a “simpleton,” one might wonder if Isaac’s overt designation as an “idiot figure” is less significant to the overall design of the narrative than it initially appears. As shlemiels, Malamud’s protagonists suffer from a double otherness, insofar as they are outsiders both to the community in which they live and to American society generally (see Gilman, Jewish Self-​Hatred, 2–​6). We find a similar dynamic in Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch’s suggestion that women with disabilities suffer from a “double oppression” (cited in Hall, 41). In “Idiots First,” this double otherness is reinforced by the juxtaposition of Mendel with the people that he encounters in the course of the narrative. At each stop, Malamud portrays varying degrees of separation between Mendel and the center of economic and cultural power in the community, yet each of these individuals is still one step (or more) removed from the Gentile norm. At the first stop, the local pawnshop, Mendel tries to sell his old watch. Despite the simple appearance of the shop, the pawnbroker exerts his power over Mendel by first making him wait for service and then by offering less than the amount that Mendel needs. The second stop, by contrast, Mendel describes as a “regular palace” (275). The home, attended by a servant, belongs to a Mr. Fishbein, “a paunchy bald-​headed man with hairy nostrils and small patent leather feet” with “a large napkin tucked under a tuxedo button” (275). The contrast between Fishbein’s tuxedoed dress and his “hairy nostrils” and dangling napkin suggests a mixture of refinement and crudeness, of privilege and common origins, indicating his status as what Hannah Arendt called “parvenu Jews” (see Cheyette, 12), in that he has achieved a degree of social status, but remains, in Brian Cheyette’s words, “cut off from true political power” (12). This is reinforced by his first words to the visitors: “Who comes on Friday night to a man that he has guests, to spoil him his supper?” (275) Malamud frequently uses such syntactical oddities –​“a man that he has guests,” “to spoil him his supper” –​to suggest a Yiddish inflection in the speech of his characters (see Wirth-​Nesher, 220). More than a stylistic gesture, this feature of the characters’ language suggests that the community in which they reside –​never wholly defined –​exists as a social and cultural entity unto itself (Alter, 30). Yet, as the example of “Idiots First” readily suggests, the presence of community does little to mitigate the pervasive sense of disconnection that the characters in his stories experience. Nevertheless, while the threads that make for relationship in a community are often tenuous, Malamud’s stories often work, as suggested earlier, towards moments of “epiphany” in which communication and communion are temporarily, tentatively established. These moments are thus significant, in Malamud’s conception, as glimpses of the transformational power of genuine community, in contrast with the isolation and disconnection typical of life in this quasi-​shtetl, with its traces of the “Jewish communities of Eastern Europe” (Rosten, 369). Despite these glimpses, the fact remains that all of these characters belong to a community that is implicitly separate from and, in terms of cultural norms, is viewed as inferior to, the larger American community of which it is a part. Thus, Mendel’s position of inferiority to those who themselves are subject to the larger community around them signals the degree to which the protagonist is doubly other. Sander Gilman explains the process by which the dominant portion of an outsider group sometimes will project the stereotypes that have been directed at the group as a whole onto a “subgroup” among the outsiders. In this way, writes Gilman, “[T]‌he quality ascribed to them as the Other…is then transferred to the new Other found within the group that those in power have designated as Other” (Jewish Self-​Hatred, 3–​4). Thus, by adopting the values of the reference group, and by applying the stereotypes that have been used against them, the primary group attempts to “escape the cloak of Otherness” (3) by projecting those stereotypes on a secondary group within their community. The danger in this lies in the fact that, “even as 145

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one distances oneself from this aspect of oneself, there is always the voice of the power group saying, Under the skin you are really like them anyhow” (3). In this sense, as Alter suggests, Malamud’s characters remain “imprisoned,” either by society or by their “scapegrace ineptitude”; yet this condition seems merely to form the backdrop to an implicit, yet possibly significant, sensibility. While it is often the very helplessness of Malamud’s characters that renders them sympathetic, for Malamud mere haplessness does not suffice as a motivation for sympathetic attention. Rather, it is the effort to overcome that incapacity –​even, or perhaps especially, when that effort is unsuccessful –​that properly refocuses our attention and sympathies from what the characters presumably lack to their struggling humanity.

The representation of intellectual disability: a “failed mimesis”? Despite the sympathy for father and son that is prompted by their very human struggles, the author’s treatment of the “idiot” son points to a more problematic aspect of the story that finds expression not just in its language but also in the development of Isaac as a character: we see that Isaac –​son of a doubly other father –​is himself triply other in that his disability places him at an even greater remove from the already alienated “privileged group” within the community. Indeed, if Mendel as a quasi-​colonial subject has been “transformed into an uncertainty which fixes…[him] as a ‘partial’ presence,” to use Bhabha’s terminology, Isaac is even more “partial,” even less present. On one level, Malamud foregrounds this alienation by having other characters repeatedly ask Mendel, as noted earlier, “What’s the matter with him?” Yet, while all of the characters display exaggerated features, the qualities that render Isaac stereotypical are clearly different in kind, in that the traits that make him a “type,” rather than drawing from a well of Jewish tropes like the other characters, are those that are typically used to suggest intellectual disability. A few examples from the larger cast of characters will demonstrate this difference. Among the characters in the story, Mendel is the only one who might be viewed as serving the function of “protagonist,” as W. J. Harvey, an earlier theorist of characterization, defines it:  “those characters whose motivation and history are most fully established, who conflict and change as the story progresses, who engage our responses more fully and steadily, in a way more complex though not necessarily more vivid than other characters” (56). In this sense, we know of Mendel’s urgency to get Isaac to the train station before he dies; we sense his love for Isaac. Readers are also presented with a backstory about the difficulties he has faced in raising a person with intellectual disabilities, as cited earlier: “For God’s sake, don’t you understand what I went through in my life with this poor boy? Look at him. For thirty-​nine years, since the day he was born, I wait for him to grow up, but he don’t. Do you understand what this means in a father’s heart?” (“Idiots First,” 280). In this way, we are given an intimation of the character’s complex inner life, even though the short story form doesn’t allow for more than the suggestion of his experience. By contrast, the other characters are rendered through short, evocative descriptive phrases that deftly suggest their nature, and which in turn enable Malamud to quickly immerse readers in medias res in the central conflicts of his stories.This is a characteristic feature of the short story form, as short story theorist Charles E. May, citing Bliss Perry, points out: “He notes that the shortness of the form requires that characters must be ‘unique, original enough to catch the eye at once’ ” (May, The Short Story, 117). This point is reinforced by Sister Mary Joselyn, also cited by May (118), when she claims that the short story relies on “a high degree of suggestiveness, emotional intensity, achieved with a minimum of means.” Thus, our introduction to the pawnbroker, who consciously ignores the father and son when they enter his store, immediately

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conveys his indifference to their plight: “The pawnbroker, a red-​bearded man with black horn-​ rimmed glasses, was eating a whitefish at the rear of the store. He craned his head, saw them, and settled back to sip his tea” (274). Similarly, Mr. Fishbein, with his combination of refined dress and crude manners (“hairy nostrils,” “a large napkin tucked under a tuxedo coat button”) is understood to represent someone who doesn’t know how to “wear” his recently-​acquired wealth: “Mr. Fishbein, a paunchy bald-​headed man with hairy nostrils and small patent leather feet, ran lightly down the stairs, a large napkin tucked under a tuxedo coat button” (275). The third person to whom Mendel and Isaac turn for aid, the local rabbi, is rendered sympathetically, yet pathetically, suggesting both the compassion and the weakness that ultimately lead him to give up his expensive coat to the two supplicants: “The rabbi was an old skinny man with bent shoulders and a wisp of white beard. He wore a flannel nightgown and black skullcap; his feet were bare” (278). Such characters are certainly types, even stereotypes, representing particular features that are familiar to readers and that enable them to grasp the scene quickly. These are the types of characters that Harvey termed “the Card,” or “the character who is a ‘character’ ” (58). Indeed, despite the evocative quality of their introductions, none of these three characters is “whole” or “dynamic” in the sense that Baruch Hochman considers among the essential elements in what constitutes a more fully developed character (103–​16; 132–​38; see also Halliwell, 14; Sklar, “Reading Other Minds,” 242). Rather, they are at the less-​defined end of what Uri Margolin suggests occurs in our conceptualization of all fictional characters: “Characters are thus partially indeterminate (schematic, not fully individuated), and are technically person-​kinds who can be filled in (specified, concretized) in various ways and to different degrees” (Margolin, 68). In this sense, characters that are deliberately, strategically “indeterminate” –​that is to say, incomplete –​are completed in a process of “readerly imaginative re-​creation” (Margolin, 69; see also Sklar, Art of Sympathy, 1–​22). While this “indeterminacy,” and the need to imaginatively “fill in” the details of the character, is necessitated by the brevity of the short story itself, for the purposes of Malamud’s story it is important to identify what he does tell us, as well as what is left unspecified. Each of these characters possesses trace elements of identifiable –​albeit stereotypical –​Jewish features: the pawnbroker, eating whitefish; Fishbein, his Yiddish inflection; the rabbi, of course, his profession. Some of these shorthand features, particularly the speech pattern, are present even in the more developed Mendel. What we find, in any case, is a broad range of Jewish “types” that, together, form a sort of communal whole.This whole, in turn, overrides the dominance of the stereotype of any one individual. It is significant, therefore, that Isaac lacks features that might be interpreted as “Jewish,” despite the startling number of disclosures –​at least 40, nearly half in the first third of the story –​ that are provided relating to his character. On the first page of the story, we find references to “his astonished mouth open” and his “small eyes and ears” (273), and there are descriptions throughout the story of Isaac’s animalistic “mewling” (276, 280), “yowling” (277), and “yelping” (280). All of these features –​the physical vacuity and abnormality, the association with animals –​ are common tropes in the representation of intellectual disability (see Halliwell, 144; Sklar, “Reading Other Minds,” 241). Add to these the almost parodic incapacity of Isaac’s attempt to count to ten –​“One…two…nine” (273); his single-​word sentences like “Schlaf ” (sleep, 273), “Hungrig” (hungry, 276), and “Eggs” (275); and his obsessive concentration on primal needs and maintaining particular routines, and Isaac seems unusually simply rendered, particularly since he is present throughout the story. Several years ago (Sklar, “Reading Other Minds,” 241–​42), I argued that most intellectually disabled characters in fiction are “archetypal” in the sense suggested by Northop Frye in his classic Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1973 [1957]):

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Archetypes are associative clusters, and differ from signs in being complex variables. Within the complex is often a large number of specific learned associations which are communicable because a large number of people in a given culture happen to be familiar with them…  .The stream of literature, however, like any other stream, seeks the easiest channels first:  the poet who uses the expected associations will communicate more rapidly. (102–3, italics added) These “associations”  – features that are “familiar” and “communicated rapidly” to “a large number of people”  – are a common shortcut in literature, as I  have argued in connection with the pawnbroker and Fishbein. In that earlier essay I  outlined a series of intellectually disabled types that I have seen repeated in numerous literary works: The Animal, The Wise Fool, The Uncontrollable Monster, The Big Oaf, The Cipher, The Blank Slate, The Slovenly Dullard, and The Genial Simpleton (“Reading Other Minds,” 241–43). However, rather than viewing these as separate archetypes, as I did in that article, I now see each of these types as constituting possible expressions of one general archetype of intellectual disability. In addition, I have added to that cluster of associations The Overgrown Child and The Clown, as can be seen in Figure 12.1. Very few intellectually disabled characters in fiction, of course, possess all of these features. For example, Lennie Small in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), with his enormous size, general kindness, gullibility, and sudden proneness to violence, can be said to possess elements of The Big Oaf, The Uncontrollable Monster, The Overgrown Child, The Kind Simpleton, and The Blank Slate. By contrast, the cinematic version of Forrest Gump, who

Animal

Monster

Wise fool

Kind simpleton

Intellectually disabled character

Blank slate/ cipher

Slovenly dullard

Clown Overgrown child

Figure 12.1 Archetype of intellectual disability.

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spouts wise aphorisms without always understanding the implications of his words, and repeatedly finds himself in outlandish situations, displays elements of The Clown, The Wise Fool, The Overgrown Child, The Genial Simpleton, and The Blank Slate. These are certainly not absolute categories, but they do point to a tendency among fiction writers to portray intellectual disability in specific, narrowly-​defined ways. This is less a question of the types of representations that have been identified by what David T.  Mitchell and Sharon L.  Snyder call the “negative-​image school” (19) than of the equally problematic realization that “[t]‌he generic classification of disabled types produces an ahistorical interpretation that tends to see disability representations as slanderously consistent across cultures and periods” (25). In other words, in the case of intellectually disabled characters, they exist outside of history, and therefore outside of human society. The character of Isaac in “Idiots First” is no exception to this tendency. Mendel’s references to him as a “boy” and as having never grown out of childhood make his identification as an Overgrown Child clear. Although we don’t come to know him as deeply and intimately as we do Lennie Small or Forrest Gump, his kindness is evident in his readiness to help his father, which conveys a sense of the Kind Simpleton. Mostly, though, Isaac registers as somewhat of an empty vessel –​less a Blank Slate, on which other’s ideas can be written, than a Cipher, a non-​ entity. As noted earlier, he primarily moans (Malamud, “Idiots First,” 274), “sucks air” (274), or “mewls” (276) in response to the running monologue provided by his father, and to the events that transpire in the story. Even his one-​word sentences (“Schlaf ”/​sleep, 273; “Hungrig”/​ hungry, 276; and “Eggs,” 275) merely convey his primal, largely instinctual needs. In this sense, it is difficult to justify the extremity of Isaac’s characterization, from which most traces of sentient humanity have been removed –​the type of representation that Paul Marchbanks terms a “failed mimesis, as [a]‌representation […] of an actual, disabled population in uneasy dialogue with society” (5). In response to this type of failure, Michael Bérubé proposes “an ethics of narrative,” for which “the animating question will be what the character with an intellectual disability knows –​or can know –​about the narrative she or he inhabits” (38). To what extent does Isaac “know the narrative he inhabits”  –​understand his role within the world that is depicted in the story? There are certainly moments when Isaac transcends the simplicity of his characterization. For example, as Isaac and his father approach Fishbein’s home –​a “regular palace,” according to Mendel –​we are told that “Isaac stared uneasily at the heavy door of the house” (Malamud, “Idiots First,” 275, italics added). While the specific reason for Isaac’s “unease” is not specified, we nevertheless sense the presence of more complex feelings beneath the simplistic exterior. Similarly, when Isaac lifts Mendel after his father has collapsed near the end of the story, his inclination to help suggests a greater level of awareness than he otherwise displays. Malamud subtly motivates Isaac’s response by establishing, at other points in the story, the depth of the relationship between father and son:  by showing Mendel dressing Isaac at the beginning of the story (273); or by describing the way that Mendel seats Isaac on the train and instructs the conductor, “Be nice to him… .Show him where everything is” (281). Ultimately, though, we are left with one indelible, final image of Isaac, who, as he awaits the departure of the train, “sat at the edge of his seat, his face strained in the direction of his journey” (281). We can’t help but wonder, in that last moment, what Isaac is thinking and feeling about the journey that awaits him. Does he understand the purpose of the trip? Is he anxious about traveling to an unfamiliar place? Is he worried about his father? The story provides very little information that might help us in answering these questions, despite his centrality in the narrative. At the same time, our natural curiosity about what will become of this childlike, dependent man heightens our sense of the ethical dimensions of the relationship between father and son –​of the weighty commitment 149

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that Mendel has pursued even up to the brink of death. Our sympathies thus extend to both father and son in that moment, as Malamud foregrounds the representation of genuine relationship between them. In these moments, Isaac, due to his prominence in the story, almost rises to the level of a protagonist, in that the narrative guides readers to care what happens to him.Yet, the preponderance of stereotypical imagery leads one to suspect that Isaac –​certainly more than Mendel, and likely more than the other characters in the story –​largely serves as what Harvey (drawing on Henry James) calls a “ficelle,” “on…[which] can be loaded the weight of the typical and the representative; through him the world in which the protagonist gains his individual contours can be given the necessary mass and density” (68). From a disability studies perspective, of course, this appropriation of disability for narrative purposes would more properly be termed a form of “narrative prosthesis,” in that the character seems mainly to exist in order to move the story forward –​or, as Mitchell and Snyder put it, “simply a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potential, and analytical insight” (49). If this is true, it is hardly surprising that most of our sympathy, as noted earlier, is directed towards Mendel, and that Isaac primarily remains in the background. Isaac, in fact, is largely the object of our pity, in that his disability, as philosopher Licia Carlson puts it, is viewed as “objectively bad, and thus something to be pitied, a personal tragedy for both the individual and her family, something to be prevented and, if possible, cured” (Carlson, 5). To a certain extent, Malamud appears to resist this sensibility. When Mendel pleads, “where is your pity?” in response to Ginzburg’s uncaring reaction to Mendel’s efforts to get Isaac to the train (280), he appeals to Ginzburg’s sense of fairness and sympathy: “ ‘All my life,’ Mendel cried, his body trembling, ‘what did I have? […] I didn’t ask anybody nothing. Now I ask a small favor. Be so kind, Mr. Ginzburg” (280). Thus, while Malamud, both here and in his story “Take Pity” (Magic Barrel, 85–​95), uses the word “pity” as something akin to sympathy, as an expression of feeling for the underserved suffering of another (see Sklar, Art of Sympathy, 26–​36, for a comprehensive definition), the narrative as a whole tends to reinforce the sense of pity in its simpler, less committal, rudimentary form of feeling sorry for someone else; in other words, the type of pity of which people with disabilities often find themselves the object (see Sklar, “What the Hell,” 137–​43). Joseph P.  Shapiro claims that this form of pity, to the extent that it relies on conventional images for the representation of disabled individuals, is founded upon stereotype, which in turn locks that population into limiting and demeaning perceptions (19–​24). Recognizing the complications inherent in these features and the ways that they are used in service of advancing the “aesthetic” aims of the narrative, one might conclude that people with intellectual disabilities, like other historically subject and oppressed peoples, have also suffered from a form of “colonization” that either demeans, demonizes, or essentializes them as individuals. This is not to suggest that we ought to regard such representations as “right” or “wrong,” but that we recognize how they may fit into a larger pattern of dehumanization. As Bhabha observes, “My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention should shift from the ready recognition of images as positive or negative [cf. Mitchell and Snyder, 40–​42], to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse” (67, italics original). Bhabha thus is determined to move beyond identifying the simple “wrongness” of particular representations to consider the larger patterns of portrayal that contribute to “processes of subjectification” –​that, in this case, indeed abet readers’ misperceptions regarding people with intellectual disabilities.

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Jewishness and the myth of “superior intelligence” The primary way in which Isaac is made into a subject is through a number of discernable features, as noted earlier: his speech (“eggs”), or especially his relative inability to speak; his non-​responsive, fixated, or “moaning” behavior; and his utter dependence on others. This is expressed most clearly through the prevailing response towards Isaac –​“What’s the matter with him?” –​which suggests that others in the community view him as alien. Such responses to disability generally, or intellectual disability specifically, are hardly unique to the Jewish community; yet, it would perhaps be useful, in examining the specific nature of this version of the archetype described above, to consider one important feature of Jewish identity that complicates the response to intellectual disability particularly: the stereotypical reputation of Jews as having “superior intelligence.” Sander Gilman, in his Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence (1996), examines the pervasiveness of this image over the last two centuries. Gilman’s study was motivated, in part, by his indignation at the premises advanced by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s infamous study of “race” and intelligence, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994). Most of the revulsion towards that study, at the time of its publication, was directed at the authors’ conclusions regarding groups, particularly African Americans, whose intelligence was presumed by the study to be lower, and the ways that this type of study played into earlier, more overtly racist attempts to claim the racial inferiority of peoples of color (Gilman, Smart Jews, 3–​5). Of more direct relevance here, though, is the conclusion reached by the authors, Herrnstein and Murray, regarding what they refer to as “Ashkenasic Jews of European origins” (cited in Gilman, Smart Jews, 6). As Gilman points out, “The myth of Jewish superior intelligence has its origin in the age of biological racism. It is part of the discussion of Jews as a racial category.This myth is quickly absorbed in the discourse of racial science and continues to hold power even today” (6).Yet, as is the case with many social perceptions of groups whose status remains Other in the eyes of the dominant majority, Jews themselves have also internalized this conception, as witnessed, for example, in much of the literary and cinematic production by and about Jews in 20th-​century America (175–​206). In other words, according to Gilman, “The image of the superior intelligence ascribed to the Jews is projected onto them by the cultures in which they live and internalized by them as if they are part of their own reality, as indeed, these qualities soon become” (206). Or, as Gilman puts it in a later work on the same topic: “By this argument, if you are not a smart Jew, then you are not much of a Jew at all” (Gilman, “Are Jews Smarter,” 46). Add to this the long-​standing priority within Jewish culture given to intellectual and educational pursuits (see, for example, Short), and it is little wonder that the presence of someone like Isaac, who doesn’t fit that self-​expectation, would constitute a problem. From this perspective, the question that I have cited several times –​“What’s the matter with him?” –​might be understood to mean something less uncomprehending and more judgmental, “Why is he here?” or even “What is he?” Articulated in this way, intellectual disability is viewed as a form of existential threat, particularly if we understand the degree, as noted above, that intellectual capability has come to be seen as a defining feature of this population.This is reminiscent of Bérubé’s observation, regarding the Murry family in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, that “the stigma associated with intellectual disability structures the Murry household, precisely because the Murry household is so defined by and invested in intelligence” (40, italics original). It is perhaps for this reason that the representation of Isaac’s difference from others extends beyond personal, generally human characteristics. As suggested earlier, an important difference between the supporting characters in the story and Isaac is the reliance, in the minor characters, on specifically Jewish tropes, whereas Isaac is defined almost exclusively by his intellectual disability. With the very limited exception of his use of two Yiddish words, “Schlaf ” (sleep, 273) and “Hungrig” (hungry, 276), Isaac appears to lack any of the stereotypical or generalized 151

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markings of Jewishness that provide a cohesive sense of identity in the community, despite the divisions that exist between individuals. In this way, he lies uncomfortably outside the boundaries of Jewish communal life. Yet, this argument only takes us so far, because Malamud’s Jews –​though they may be clever or conniving or thoughtful –​are decidedly not superior in their intelligence. It is no coincidence that, as noted earlier, another widely accepted definition for shlemiel is “a foolish person; a simpleton” (Rosten, 344). In this sense, there is a subtle affinity between the majority of characters who populate “Idiots First” and Isaac: they all somehow struggle to understand what to do. When, for example, Fishbein calls Isaac “this halfwit,” Mendel responds by “flailing both arms” and cries, “Please, without names” (276). His excited “flailing” suggests an incapacity of sorts, and he is driven to wild gestures to prevent Fishbein from repeating the epithet. In this sense, Malamud subtly draws all of his hapless characters into a community-​of-​sorts.

Community and solidarity Indeed, despite the stereotypical features of Isaac’s characterization, and despite some of the subtle and overt ways in which Isaac is excluded from the society around him, the story ironically widens the circle of community to include people like Isaac. While Mendel may lament the burden of having to care for his son, while he may even continue to regard him as a child, he clearly loves and feels responsible for him. More significantly, Mendel’s utter devotion to his son, even up to the moment of his death, suggests a level of acceptance of Isaac that transcends stereotype, in that, unlike the other characters in the story, Mendel regards him as a person. Moreover, Isaac’s extreme otherness is mitigated by his surprising understanding –​given his relative incomprehension otherwise –​of the need to help his father when he is weak or feeling defeated, as in the final scene at the train station: “The crowd parted. Isaac helped his father up and they tottered down the steps to the platform where the train waited, lit and ready to go” (281). In an important sense, the dynamic of dependency has shifted, as Isaac implicitly recognizes his aging father’s need for assistance. These seeming contradictions have perhaps less to do with Malamud’s acceptance of disability, per se, and more to do with a particular conception of community that allows him to embrace all of the befuddled characters in his world, whatever their particular predicament or difficulty. It is this contrast between genuine community and isolation that has led me to adopt the term shtetl, as Hana Wirth-​Nesher has done for other Jewish American authors (219), in describing the community in Malamud’s stories. As Leo Rosten notes, a shtetl was a “[l]‌ittle city, small town, village  –​in particular, the Jewish communities of eastern Europe, where the culture of the Ashkenazim flourished (before World War II)” (369). The “Ashkenazim,” Rosten adds, is “[t]he name applied, since the sixteenth century, to the Jews of central and eastern Europe –​ancestors of the vast majority of Jews in the United States” (19). Malamud’s characters, by carrying over to their new community the language and trades that characterized their lives in the shtetls, ironically create for themselves the semblance of communities that no longer exist. In addition, they perpetuate the shtetl’s traditional role of protection from outside hostility, a threat that is suggested occasionally at the margins of Malamud’s stories. The illusory nature of this “metaphorically” constructed community –​what Alter calls evocatively “the shadow of a vestige of a specter” (30) –​nevertheless possesses the suggestion of a yearning for genuine community that can be found in Malamud’s short fiction. Malamud himself confirmed in an interview that his aim in his writing was more than just the portrayal of human misery; that his idea of art is “close to Frost’s definition of a poem as ‘a momentary stay against confusion.’ Morality begins with an awareness of the sanctity of one’s 152

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life, hence the lives of others… .” (Plimpton, 159).The “confusion” of which Malamud speaks is precisely the monotony of “imprisonment” –​the unchanging, purposeless, hopeless quality of the characters’ lives –​that Alter describes. Malamud’s attempt to “stay” that confusion, to lift his characters, even momentarily, above the desperation that characterizes their lives, suggests the seed of action. Indeed, I am prompted by Malamud’s declared ethical sensibility to wonder, with J. Hillis Miller, “What should I as a reader do ‘on the basis’ of the knowledge I gain by reading [a] novel?” (91) More precisely, in what ways will “the reader in reading [a] book and as a result of this piece of conduct of life…[go] on to do other things that, in their turn, cause yet other things to be done” (91)? One significant emphasis in the American Jewish community, in recent years, has been the promotion of greater awareness of, and activism on behalf of, people with disabilities. In part, this has been a recognition of how attitudes and even policies have led to exclusion (Ne’eman, pars. 3, 4, 6). In other cases, it has involved an increased sense of solidarity with people with disabilities, for example, through the inception of a Jewish Disability Awareness Month (Waterstone, par. 1). Most significant, perhaps, is the attempt to contextualize a history of exclusionist tendencies. As Shelly Christensen points out, in the first half of the 20th century –​precisely the period represented in Malamud’s fiction: In many Jewish communities, disability was considered a shonde, or a shame upon the family. Once when I  was giving a presentation on the Minneapolis Jewish Community Inclusion Program for People with Disabilities at a synagogue, an older man approached me with tears in his eyes. He told me about his son, now grown, who was not welcome to attend religious school, have a bar mitzvah ceremony, or be involved in any way in Jewish activities. His sense of shame and embarrassment came not from his own expectations for his son, but from the Jewish community, which refused to allow his child in its institutions. (Christensen, par. 14) Christensen notes, however, that such attitudes are changing, and people with disabilities are finding acceptance and inclusion in many activities and areas of the community. Given this history and the struggle to overcome it, the last words spoken by Fishbein –​the primary villain, if we exclude Ginzburg, the emissary of the Angel of Death  –​are significant: “Take him to an institution” (276). The fact that the story’s protagonist, Mendel, adamantly, desperately refuses to do so is an important signal to readers of the story’s ethos, despite the limitations of Malamud’s representation. In an important sense, then, the contradictions that exist in Malamud’s world –​between acceptance and exclusion, community and isolation –​are the divides that all marginalized communities face today. The implicit message in “Idiots First,” indeed, is one of solidarity, but this does not come without negotiation and struggle. In this regard, the story provides a fertile platform on which to engage in the intersectional engagement that has begun to enable peoples of diverse backgrounds and needs to resist the structures in society that deny them their humanity.1

Note 1 I would like to thank Prof. James Phelan (Ohio State University) for his thoughtful comments in response to an early conference version of this essay. I also greatly appreciate the insightful observations on disability and Jewish intelligence provided by Prof. Sander Gilman, (Emory University), who kindly read a near-final draft of the essay. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr Alice Hall (University of York) for her interest in my work, as well as her detailed notes and suggestions for the present essay.

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Works cited Alter, Robert. “Jewishness as Metaphor.” Bernard Malamud and the Critics, edited by Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field. New York: New York University Press, 1970, pp. 29–​42. Bérubé, Michael. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Carlson, Licia. The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Cheyette, Bryan. Diasporas of the Mind:  Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013. Christensen, Shelly. “Inspired by Moses: Disability and Inclusion in the Jewish Community.” Tikkun, 20 October 2014. www.tikkun.org/​nextgen/​inspired-​by-​moses-​disability-​and-​inclusion-​in-​the-​jewish-​ community. Accessed: September 22, 2019. Field, Leslie A. and Joyce W. Field, editors. Bernard Malamud and the Critics. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Gilman, Sander L. “Are Jews Smarter Than Everyone Else?” MSM, 6, 2008, 41–​47. —​—​—​. Jewish Self-​Hatred: Anti-​Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 1986. —​—​—​. Smart Jews:  The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence. Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Goodley, Dan, and Mark Rapley. “How Do You Understand ‘Learning Difficulties’? Towards a Social Theory of Impairment.” Mental Retardation, 39, 3, 2001, 229–​32. Hall, Alice. Literature and Disability. London: Routledge, 2016. Halliwell, Martin. Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004. Harvey, W. J. Character and the Novel. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965. Hochman, Baruch. Character in Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Malamud, Bernard.“Idiots First.” The Complete Stories, edited by Robert Giroux. New York: The Noonday Press, 1997, pp. 273–​81. —​—​—​. Idiots First. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1966 (1963). —​—​—​. The Magic Barrel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970 (1958). Marchbanks, Paul. “From Caricature to Character: The Intellectually Disabled in Dickens’s Novels” (Part One). Dickens Quarterly, 23, 1, 2006, 3–​14. Margolin, Uri. “Character.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 66–​79. May, Charles E. The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. —​—​—​. “The Short Story’s Way of Meaning: Alice Munro’s ‘Passion.’ ” Narrative, 20, 2, 2012, pp. 172–​82. Miller, J. Hillis. “Is There an Ethics of Reading?” Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, edited by James Phelan. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthetics: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Ne’eman, Ari. “How We’re Failing Jews with Disabilities.” Forward, 1 February 2016, https://​forward.com/​ opinion/​332630/​how-​were-​failing-​jews-​with-​disabilities/​. Accessed: September 22, 2019. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction:  Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Plimpton, George, ed. “Interview of Bernard Malamud.” Writers at Work: Sixth Series. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Rohrberger, Mary. “Origins, Development, Substance, and Design of the Short Story: How I Got Hooked on the Short Story and Where It Led Me.” The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, edited by Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei. Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 2004, pp. 1–​13. Rosten, Leo. The Joys of Yiddish. New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1968. Shapiro, Joseph P. No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993.

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“What’s the matter with him?” Short, Geoffrey. “The Role of Education in Jewish Continuity:  A Response to Jonathan Sacks.” British Journal of Religious Education, 27, 3, 253–​64, https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​01416200500141389. Accessed: July 1, 2018. Sklar, Howard. The Art of Sympathy in Fiction:  Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion. “Linguistic Approaches to Literature” series. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2013. —​—​—​. “Narrative Empowerment through Comics Storytelling:  Facilitating the Life Stories of the Intellectually Disabled.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 4, 2012, pp. 123–​49. —​—​—​. “Narrative Structuring of Sympathetic Response: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Toni Cade Bambara’s ‘The Hammer Man’.” Poetics Today, 30, 3, 2009, pp. 561–​607. —​ —​ —​ . “Reading Other Minds:  Ethical Considerations on the Representation of Intellectual Disability in Fiction.” Disability Research Today:  International Perspectives, edited by Tom Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 2015, pp. 235–​48. —​—​—​. “ ‘What the Hell Happened to Maggie?’: Stereotype, Sympathy, and Disability in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 5, 2, 2011, pp. 137–​ 54. Special issue, “Representing Disability and Emotion.” Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. London: Penguin, 2006 (1937). Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1978. Toolan, Michael. “Engagement via Emotional Heightening in ‘Passion’: On the Grammatical Texture of Emotionally-​Immersive Passages in Short Fiction.” Narrative, 20, 2, 2012, pp. 210–​25. Waterstone, Michael. “Jews and Disabilities: What Still Must Be Done.” Jewish Journal, 12 February 2013. http://​jewishjournal.com/​opinion/​112871/​. Accessed: September 22, 2019. Winther, Per. “Frames Speaking:  Malamud, Silko, and the Reader.” Short Story Theories:  A Twenty-​first-​ century Perspective, edited by Viorica Patea. Leiden: Brill/​Rodopi, 2012, pp. 89–​107. Winther, Per, Michael Trussler, Michael Toolan, Charles E. May, and Susan Lohafer. “Dialogues.” Narrative, 20, 2, 2012, pp. 239–​53. Wirth-​Nesher, Hana. “Language as Homeland in Jewish American Literature.” Insider/​Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, edited by David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Zemeckis, Robert, dir. Forrest Gump. Wendy Finerman Productions, 1994.

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13 METAPHORICAL MEDICINE Disability in Anglophone Indian fiction Stephanie Yorke

Moraes, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, says of his fused hand that “civilization is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves. My hand, gentle reader, lacked sleight; but it knew what manner of thing it was” (365). The sleight of hand performed by civilization takes many forms in Moraes’s poly-​cultural city, and the plural interpretations which overwrite the concrete fact of Moraes’s body provide what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder describe as “an important barometer by which to assess shifting values and norms imposed upon the body” (51). Moraes’s body is repeatedly subjected to violent medical intervention, and the violence of medicine takes on symbolic weight. As in many Anglophone works of fiction, clinical medicine becomes a metonym or corollary for imposed power structures, including patriarchy, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Complexities of place and identity complicate reading disability. Helen Meekosha contends that scholars must “be conscious about the lack of geopolitical specificity in disability studies” (678), and Clare Barker and Stuart Murray have criticized “over-​rigid models and vocabularies” which fail to perform “situated analysis” (220). However, situated analysis is not a simple matter of excluding Euro-​American responses to the body, especially given the marked catholicity of Anglophone Indian fiction: Priyamvada Gopal describes it as “heterogeneous and capacious” (3); Meenaskshi Mukherjee as “discontinuous” (175); and Ulka Anjaria suggests that no genealogy accounts for its divergent manifestations. The most misleading genealogies might be those which attempt to isolate Anglophone Indian fiction from international and intralingual influences: British-​Indian novelist Rudyard Kipling, or Urdu/​Hindi fiction writer Premchand, who in his turn claimed “Dickens,Tolstoy, Chekov and Marx” amongst his literary forebears, both offer disability representations which are situated in a heterogeneous imaginary which may be read as cognate with other Anglophone Indian fiction (Premchand iii). As Ato Quayson suggests in his Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2007), due to “the West’s continuing contact with the rest of the world through the colonial adventure and the attendant flows of people across borders” (12), understandings of disability compete and mingle, and “ ‘new’ and ‘old’ ideas are sometimes reconstituted to produce new perspectives and realities” (13). This discursive recombination and reconstitution has been driven in part by the dissemination of medical paradigms and practices. Scientific medicine bears the stigma of what is often perceived as its European colonial origin, and, relatedly, concern over “changing tradition to 156

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accommodate modern/​Western medicine,” is, as Patrick Colm Hogan has noted, “a common motif in postcolonization literature” (266). In The Discovery of India (1946), Jawaharlal Nehru lays claim to modern medicine in the context of a postcolonial India by contesting its supposed “western” provenance, describing the ancient “Indian science of medicine” with its textbooks which: enumerate a large number of diseases and give methods of diagnosis and treatment. They deal with surgery, obstetrics, baths, dies, hygiene, infant-​feeding, and medical education. The approach was experimental, and the dissection of dead bodies was being practiced in the course of surgical training.” (115) Nehru’s history participates in a discursive change already well-​underway by the time the British quit India. As historian Gyan Prakash has noted, “by the early twentieth century, then, the authority of science had become widely dispersed” and “spaces ranging from major colonial cities to small district towns witnessed the permeation of science as a grammar of transformation” (63). While colonial discourse had stigmatized the east as “metaphysical and out of touch with modernity,” by the late nineteenth century the Hindu intelligentsia had begun to argue “with remarkable ingenuity and deep cultural learning that the ancient Hindus had originated scientific knowledge and that this justified the modern existence of Indians as a people” (86). Science, including medical science, was cast as endemic as well as utopian in its potentials. As anyone familiar with Indian history since partition and independence is well aware, the optimism of Nehru and others did not manifest is a real utopia, and especially not for minorities within India.This chapter considers the representation of disability in a selection of Anglophone Indian fiction and argues that medical violence and medical interventions take on politicized symbolic weight which is informed by a post-​colonial context and the perceived heritage of clinical medicine. Authors including Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Indra Sinha, and Firdaus Kanga, create historically informed metaphors around disabled central characters who are confronted by medical violence and corrupt physicians, and create in attending doctors or healers a personification of larger “social ills” or unjust impositions of a controlling and constraining society upon the individual.

Disability and the excisions of the nation: Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry “The Indian nation-​state as we know it today,” Gopal reminds us, is “a consequence of historical accidents and political transformations that took place over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (11). If Nehru’s vision for the nation represents an idealized culmination of these transformations and accidents, the failure of this ideal is represented through a destructive grammar of science by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Stephen Morton suggests that in The Moor’s Last Sigh, “events such as the Emergency and the destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu groups signals the failure of Nehru’s liberal vision of postcolonial modernity” (94). In her reading of Midnight’s Children, Clare Barker draws a similar connection from a disability-​critical standpoint, suggesting that “Saleem’s progressive impairment reflects the collapse of the Nehruvian ideal” (129). Midnight’s Children is the first-​person narrative of a Bombay Muslim, Saleem Sinai, who interprets post-​Independence national history as a series of stigma enacted upon his body, resulting in his progressive, violent disablement, and the loss of magical gifts with which he was born. Saleem describes the ultimate results of three decades’ allegorical battering, noting 157

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that he is “nine-​fingered, horn-​templed, monk’s-​tonsured. Stain-​faced, bow-​legged, cucumber-​ nosed, castrated, and now prematurely aged” (Rushdie 447). As Barker suggests, Rushdie makes “extensive use of the body and biopolitics to represent the tensions between difference and homogenization, diversity and regulation” (127). Saleem loses his magic to coercive medical interventions which are performed because he is perceived to be abnormal. He is repeatedly coerced into the Breach Candy Hospital, where he always suffers trauma or deletion of a magic gift or potential. It is prophesied of Saleem that “doctors will drain him” and “tyrants will fry him,” and, indeed, even after he is an adult without parents to drag him to the hospital, the perpetration against his body continues at the hands of physician-​like officials (Rushdie 87). The role of tyrant and doctor fully merge in the novel’s final chapters in the person of a fictionalized Indira Gandhi, who oversees the sterilization of Saleem and 500 other magical children in a top-​secret prison-​clinic. Indira Gandhi, like the many bad doctors who try to regularize Saleem’s body in childhood, uses medical violence to enforce uniformity, countering her father Nehru’s vision for a diverse India supported by medicine adapted to work for, rather than upon, the Indian people. This reading of disability in Midnight’s Children is complicated by Saleem’s unreliability, specifically his indeterminate ability to represent his body, which is brought to light by a visiting medical doctor who “impugned my state of mind, cast doubt on my reliability as a witness, and Godknowswhatelse” by claiming to “see no cracks” (Rushdie 65). The deployment of a doctor to force the question of the narrator’s sanity is one of the strongest parallels between Midnight’s Children and G.V. Desani’s All About H Hatterr (1948). Within the first pages of H.Hatterr, as the first-​person narrator describes the process of finding a publisher for the text in hand, he notes that after rejection of the manuscript by one press, “I passed it elsewhere. And he referred me to a well-​known psychiatrist friend of his (at a mental clinic). The doctor posted it, with an invitation to meet him –​professionally” (Desani 4). This narrator, like Saleem, opens the door for scrutiny of his mental health, drawing attention to the division between the perceptions of the rationality-​imposing doctors and the fantastic world he narrates. The tension between the world of these interloping doctors and that of the narrators contributes to the sense of a competition or a tension between imaginative self-​fashioning and more exclusionary ways of seeing the world. Even as Rushdie makes disability central to Midnight’s Children, his disability representations are not unilaterally positive. Neil ten Kortenaar describes Midnight’s Children as “a compendium of every English-​language idiom referring to the body that Rushdie can think of ”; pointing toward disability clichés that abound in the novel (86). Rushdie employs disability tropes –​for instance, equating blindness with folly in the person of Ghani, and deafness as an analogue for animality or chaos in the Sundarbans’ narration –​and to some extent figures disability as a spectacle. Graham Huggan has noted that “the figure of Saleem Sinai, the novel’s narrator-​ protagonist” invites reading “as an Orientalist merchant cannily inviting the reader to sample his own, and India’s, exotic wares,” which include “snake-​charmers, genies, fakirs: elegant saris and crude spittoons,” in addition to, in my reading, disabled bodies (72). In a scene focalized through the consciousness of Saleem’s mother, Amina, as she makes her way through a Bombay slum, her observation takes on tones of horror, censure, and fascination as she observes a traditional healer “fastening twigs and leaves to shattered limbs, wrapping cracked heads in palm fronds, until his patients resemble artificial trees” (Rushdie 84). Amina effectively enables the reader to stare at sick and disabled bodies in the slum as she encounters them herself. In Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Moraes, the disabled first-​person narrator, is less obsessive about the metaphoric tangencies between his body and the polity around him than Saleem. However, Moraes also notes the metaphorical connections between the city he lives in and his

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own disabilities, and experiences similar metaphoric violence as medics attempt to normalize his body. Rather than delving into the ghoulish, cartoonish, and cinematic in recounting his suffering under medicine, he all but bypasses recounting the torments of the clinic. “I will spare you the doctors,” Moraes says, acknowledging parenthetically that (To this day the words “Breach Candy Hospital” conjure up, for me, the memory of a sort of house of correction, a benevolent torture chamber, a zone of infernal torments run by well-​meaning demons who mortified me.) (Rushdie 162) “Mortified,” with its several connotations, suggests that Moraes has been both embarrassed and physically scourged. This “benevolent torture chamber” carries a sense exorcism in the historic European sense, and especially so given that Moraes’s foregrounded matrilineal heritage is Spanish Catholic. The possibility that the Breach Candy Hospital may be working on behalf of a vindictive and restrictive European god recurs when Moraes loses his potency in a clinical encounter. Moraes’s loss of potency is the end of the family line begun in his parents’ mixed (Jewish and Catholic) marriage. As in Midnight’s Children, the hospital becomes both catalyst and site for parental rejection as Moraes’s father Abraham indicts his son: “ ‘the one thing I wanted from you’ he spat at my bedside at the Breach Candy Hospital, ‘even that you can’t give me now’ ” (Rushdie 341). Moraes becomes impotent against the backdrop of a recently renamed Mumbai which is becoming increasingly intolerant as violent ethno-​ nationalism comes to the fore. The hospital –​in curtailing the multiple differences brought together in Moraes’s person  –​carries out an act of ethnic normalizing through a violent “repair” to a disabled body.

Dissolution and persistence: Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, and Jhumpa Lahiri The sense of things “coming to an end” through disablement is also present in the work of Parsi author Rohinton Mistry. Mistry –​an author who infuses his short fiction and novels with an awareness of the fallibility of the human body –​has often been contrasted with Rushdie, as, while both write contemporaneous fictions that engage with problems of minority identity in India, they demonstrate divergent aesthetic approaches. Ayelet Ben-​Yishai and Eit an Bar-​Yosef have suggested that, while “Rushdie’s representation of the Emergency, and of Indira Gandhi, is all crisis and hyperbole,” Mistry’s less uproarious fictions have “the ability to contain both crisis and continuity and thus to address the event’s political complexity” (166). In contrast to Rushdie’s quasi-​demonic family-​planning clinic, Mistry in A Fine Balance (1995) tells the more pedestrian but equally devastating story of mismanagement and corruption in a satellite medical clinic. When tailors Ishvar and his nephew Omprakash are forced to undergo vasectomy as part of the family planning program, a doctor is bullied by a corrupt official with a grudge against the tailors’ family to misdiagnose Omprakash with testicular cancer and castrate him. Ishvar subsequently contracts gangrene due to poor hygiene at the sterilization camp, and, although he presents with very pronounced symptoms –​“Ishvar’s legs were swollen like columns. His body burned with fever. From the groin to the knee the flesh had become black” –​he is refused diagnosis when he returns to the clinic, as no doctor associated with the family-​planning program is willing to admit the relationship between the forced surgery and the illness (Mistry 627). As a result of doctors’ dissembling, Ishvar loses both legs.

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Eli Park Sorensen has suggested that in Mistry’s works, “an exploration of the cause-​effect relationship” takes on “an almost obsessive character” (206). However, this exploration is as much invested in when the causal relationship seems to give way to repetition and continuity; as Hilary Mantel has noted, in reading A Fine Balance (1995), “one feels controlled, as if by a bad god” (qtd in Sorensen 195). While the violence against Omprakash is a causal outcome of Omprakash and his father’s actions, Ishvar’s disablement is perhaps a manifestation of the bad god, as it creates in his body a replacement for Shankar, a disabled beggar who died a few chapters earlier. Like Shankar, Ishvar must use a platform with wheels to travel about; like Shankar, Ishvar begs to earn a living, relinquishing the multi-​generational mission of Ishvar and Omprakash’s family to escape caste constraint and attain better economic prospects for their family.With Omprakash unable to procreate and Ishvar unable to use the foot treadle on a conventional sewing machine, this mission is apparently forfeit. The medical clinic thus provides both causal and symbolic closure through violence in the last chapter, in part by replacing one disabled body with another. Disability and socioeconomic submission function as a contingent pair in A Fine Balance. When they are able-​bodied, the four central characters reject social scripts: Dina Dalal tries to maintain financial and domestic autonomy, against gender expectations; Maneck is apathetic about stepping into his upper-​middle-​class career; and the tailors want to be tailors, rather than doing the dirty and dangerous work designated for their caste. Dina becomes anorexic after her attempt to resist her brother’s patriarchal authority fails, and the tailors become disabled and then give up their struggle, accepting a static existence in itinerant penury. Beyond the loss of their employer, Dina, the tailors are not completely unable to sew; Omprakash has all the hands and feet necessary to operate a conventional sewing machine, and Ishvar still has his hands; so why not sew? Perhaps, and very plausibly, the insult as well as the injury  –​which is to say, social devaluation read into disablement, in combination with the physical sufferings imposed by their disabilities –​cow these two men, who have previously shown remarkable adaptability, tenacity, and willingness to take risks. Doctors are represented as having the power to excise the potential for change, and, as in Rushdie, disability is the evidence of the excision. However, Anglophone Indian fiction also offers depictions which engage with disability as a mode of persistence rather than an ending, and the domestic outcomes for other women characters contrast Dina Dalal’s sad ending. Novelist Anita Desai, like Mistry, takes an interest in the domestic space and domestic economy, but differs from Mistry in that she places less emphasis on the historical contingencies of most of her works: as Chandra Chatterjee suggests, in Desai’s fiction, a preoccupation with society recedes, leaving an “unfettered vacuum” (123). Desai herself claims to write “the kind of novels that have been catalogued by critics as psychological, and that are purely subjective” (“Timid Movement of a Wing” 21). In Desai’s acclaimed novel Clear Light of Day (1980), the psychological and the subjective are explored through the disabled character Baba. Clear Light of Day employs shifting third-​person focalization through multiple characters, including the central protagonist Bimla (called Bim), who is Baba’s primary caregiver, Bim and Baba’s sister Tara, and occasionally other characters. In one passage, in which the adult sisters look upon Baba napping, their consciousnesses are amalgamated into a united focalization: Baba was already asleep on his bed in the veranda when the sisters slipped quietly past […] lying there in the dark, dressed in white, breathing quite imperceptibly, he might have been a creature without blood in his veins, without flesh on his bones, the sisters thought as they tiptoed past him, down the steps to the lawn to stroll. (40–​41) 160

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The sisters have shared a perception, and, although they underestimate the extent of the interior life revealed through Desai’s occasional focalization through Baba’s consciousness, they assign value to him that others do not. The sisters are aware even in childhood that “Baba’s very life and existence” is a disappointment to their parents, yet they “only sense all of this, they did not share it, except unwillingly. To them Baba was the perpetual baby who never grew up –​that was his charm, they felt, and never thought of his actual age” (Desai 130). Although neither Bim nor Tara are perpetually charmed by Baba –​both lash out at him verbally over the course of the novel –​both sisters on the whole demonstrate solidarity with and love for their brother. The greatest solidarity is perhaps that of Bim, who is subject to misunderstanding and abuse as she takes responsibility for her brother’s care.The most significant affront to Bim comes from the medical doctor Biswas, who courts Bim as a young woman. When she rejects his suit, he makes a pronouncement in respect of her rejection: “Now I understand why you do not want to marry. You have dedicated your life to others –​your sick brother and your aged aunt and your little brother who will be dependent upon you all his life.You have sacrificed your life for them.” Bim’s mouth fell open with astonishment at this horrendous speech so solemnly, so leadenly spoken as if engraved on steel for posterity. (Desai 97) Doctor Biswas, who has already revealed himself as pedantic and without imagination in his discussion of Mozart and the violin, inserts a diagnosis of Bim’s life choices here. However, as he tries to lay bare her motives, it is his psychology that is left quite naked as he uses his social authority as a doctor to insulate himself from Bim’s romantic rejection. The doctor is made to look foolish in part through the nonchronological ordering of the novel, which presents Bim in late middle-​age before the damning diagnosis of Dr Biswas in her youth. While Bim makes sacrifices for Baba, the reader already knows that she will not endure quite the utter sacrifice or the living death denoted by Biswas’s comments. As it is framed by Desai, the “leadenly spoken” diagnosis-​insult of Doctor Biswas validates Bim’s rejection of his marriage suit rather than enabling the doctor to pathologize it. Clear Light of Day establishes Bim’s caregiving as an expression of agency in the context of limited choices, as opposed to a simplified, total sacrifice. For another protagonist, the patriarchal imposition upon her works in something of an opposite way: Bibi Haldar wants to marry and have children but is impeded by her community’s beliefs about disability. Short fiction writer Jhumpa Lahiri also puts diagnostic language front and center in her 1999 story collection The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and especially so in the story “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar,” in which the eponymous protagonist is “liable to fall unconscious and enter, at any moment, into a shameless delirium” (159). This delirium is characterized as “shameless” by the story’s caring-​yet-​censorious first-​person plural narrator, who seems to be an amalgam of the women of Bibi Haldar’s apartment block. The narrating women or woman –​the narrator maintains a plural/​singular, we/​I voice throughout the story –​ observe that Bibi wants to join them in performing conventions of their class and gender: “like the rest of us, she wanted to serve suppers, and scold servants, and set aside money in her almari to have her eyebrows threaded every three weeks at the Chinese beauty parlour” (Lahiri 160). However, Bibi is denied a conventional gender role due to her disability. She yearns to marry, but, upon placing a marriage advertisement that reads “GIRL, UNSTABLE, HEIGHT 152 CENTIMETRES, SEEKS HUSBAND” finds no one interested: as the women tell us, “the identity of the prospective bride was no secret to the parents of our young men, and no family 161

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was willing to shoulder so blatant a risk” (Lahiri 165). This “risk” clearly scares the women as well as any prospective bridegroom: after Bibi has a seizure in a public park, the women explain that “a group of our husbands carried her home” and “we followed behind, at what we assumed to be safe distances, holding our children by the hand,” thereby literalizing Bibi’s exclusion from the community she desires (Lahiri 168). Attempts to treat Bibi Haldar involve diverse religionists as well as diverse medics. “For the greater number of her twenty-​nine years, Bibi Haldar suffered from an ailment that baffled family, friends, priests, palmists, spinsters, germ therapists, prophets, and fools,” the women tell us, going on to note that “treatments offered by doctors only made matters worse. Allopaths, homeopaths, ayurvedics –​over time, all branches of the medical arts had been consulted” (Lahiri 158). While the women do not differentiate between medical and other paradigms, their recollection of Bibi’s father suggests that he had a dominantly rationalistic, but religiously informed, paradigm in mind as he searched for a solution: In his final years, the old man, a teacher of mathematics in our elementary schools, had kept assiduous track of Bibi’s illness in hopes of determining some logic to her condition. […] He wrote letters to doctors in England, spent his evenings reading casebooks at the library, gave up eating meat on Fridays in order to appease his household god. (Lahiri 166) His efforts, however, are to no avail, as the women explain: “though in his youth he had received prizes for his ability to deduce square roots from memory, he was unable to solve the mystery of his daughter’s disease” (Lahiri 166). Bibi’s father dies, and she is left to the guardianship of her remaining male relative, and one sense of the titular “treatment” gives way to another: she is given increasingly poor treatment by her cousin and his family. The cousin finally abandons Bibi, and the penultimate paragraphs of Lahiri’s story seem to anticipate Bibi’s death through her illness, teasing the stereotyped ending described by Mitchell and Snyder, in which “narrative inevitably punishes its own prurient interests by overseeing the extermination of the object of its fascination” (57). However, in a surprise ending, Bibi turns out to be pregnant and quickly attains economic autonomy by taking over her cousin’s abandoned shop. Childbearing has the very unlikely effect of curing Bibi’s seizure disorder. Beyond Lahiri’s mug-​game of switching death for life at the last moment, she innovates in respect of disability representation by making informal, female agency central to the resolution of the story. The women, disability-​phobic as they are, provide the crucial component of Bibi’s “treatment” when they boycott her neglectful cousin’s shop, and later when they support her business. For all her father’s efforts to improve Bibi’s situation through medicine, it is ultimately social intercessions that enable her to attain a semblance of the life she craves.

Disability and counter-​humiliation in Indra Sinha and Firdaus Kanga As in Bibi’s case, disabilities complicated by social life are often of mysterious or fortuitous origin. However, the provenance of disability may also be historically particular, creating in the body what Amitav Ghosh describes as “predicaments which are unique predicaments, not repeatable in time and place” (qtd in van Bever Donker 51). People disabled by unique predicament may present disability identities which are not only intersectional with, but predicated upon, race, gender, or other social location. Systemic violence and mass violence can generate contiguous disabilities, and may even impose corporeal continuity rather than difference as 162

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techniques of industry and technologies of war disable recognizable cohorts. Such historically contingent disability experience is the focus of Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People. Animal’s People is set in a fictional city modelled upon the city of Bhopal, which was affected by an explosion and pesticide leak in a Union Carbide plant in 1984. Narrated in the first person by a poor and disabled young man who was orphaned in the gas leak, Animal’s People tells the story of a preponderantly disabled community from its most severely disabled corner, a slum called the Nutcracker: the unsightly factory was placed beside the slum, and therefore disproportionately killed and disabled poor people. Within global considerations, the factory was allowed to operate without effective safety protocol by an American company because that company perceived an Indian city as a location available for risk. As Pablo Mukherjee suggests, “the blasted and ravaged postcolonial grounds of Khaufpur/​Bhopal” present “the toxic logical outcome of the contemporary mantra of globalization and development” manifest in damaged bodies (231). Animal, the narrator, shares with Mistry’s disabled character Shankar the imposition of his disabilities upon him by profit-​seekers; however, while Shankar’s disabilities are imposed directly, Animal’s disabilities are an accidental by-​product of a globalized capitalism. Twenty years after the disaster, the Khaufpuris are still being denied ameliorative justice through officious legal delay. As Animal explains, the case against the Kampani [the company] had been dragging on endless years. It stood accused of causing the deaths of thousands on that night, plus it ran away from Khaufpur without cleaning its factory, over the years the poisons it left found their way into the wells, everyone you meet seems to be sick. The Khaufpuris were demanding that the Kampani must pay proper compensation to those whose loved ones it killed, whose health it ruined. (Sinha 33) One of the ways in which the company evades justice is by controlling doctoring in Khaufpur. A preponderance of disabled people comprises a visible counterproof to the company’s denials of the atrocity and its scale, and these bodies thus become a potential legal asset. “Some bigwig” (Sinha 112)  replaces the doctors who would keep an accurate record of the Khaufpuri’s symptoms with doctors who function as professional disability-​deniers, “doctoring” the medical record on behalf of their benefactors. However, Elli Doctress, who comes to Khaufpur from America, provides a counterpoint to the collaborators who control medicine in Khaufpur. Even after he becomes friends with Elli, Animal has both hope and doubt that she has the imaginative adaptability to engage in Khaufpur. Animal tests Elli in this respect, using the device he uses to test other outsiders: Animal humiliates himself, employing self-​poor-​shaming and self-​disability-​shaming to challenge and teach. As Ashis Nandy suggests, in the presence of an asymmetry of power, “humiliation can be a means of renewal and re-​education for both sides” (271) and “playful counter-​humiliation” can in some contexts be a “means of defiance” (272). Animal’s perpetual defiance begins with his name, which originated as a disability slur against him in the orphanage where he grew up. As he explains, “some things have a logic which cannot be denied. How do you shit, when your arse is in the air and your legs too weak to squat?” going on to suggest he looks like “a donkey dropping dung” (Sinha 16). Animal offers this self-​portrait to at least two interlocutors simultaneously, as he dictates his story to a foreign journalist knowing the journalist will in turn render that oral narrative for print circulation and a first-​world readership Animal calls “eyes” “looking for things to see” (Sinha 12). Animal’s disability-​self-​mockery often targets these distant eyes as well as charitable interlopers in his midst. When the foreign journalist greets Animal “with hushed respect as if speaking a prayer” 163

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(Sinha 4), Animal responds with verbal filth in a language the journalist cannot understand, culminating in a “filthy song”: “I may be just a twisted runt/​But I can sniff your mother’s cunt” (5). When the middle-​class activist Zafar tells Animal to “think of yourself as specially abled,” and asserts that Animal is “a human being, entitled to dignity and respect” (Sinha 23), Animal’s retort comes replete with intentionally lewd language: “my name is Animal” and “I’m not a fucking human being, I’ve no wish to be one” (24). Animal employs this mode of counter-​humiliation with Elli Doctress in the scene in which she visits his hovel. After he parries her gravitas and “pigeon-​coos” about his impoverishment with excrement jokes (Sinha 184), Animal tells Elli what disgusts him far more than the condition of his house: “What really disgusts me is that we people seem so wretched to you outsiders that you look at us with that so-​soft expression, speak to us with that so-​pious tone in your voice.” She asks very seriously, “Don’t people here deserve respect?” “It’s not respect, is it? I can read feelings. People like you are fascinated by places like this. It’s written all over you, all you folk from Amrika and Vilayat, jarnaliss, filmwallass, photographass, anthrapologiss.” “I’m not a jarnalis, I’m a doctress. And I did mean respect.” (184–​85) Animal’s lumping-​in of Elli with the other oppressive and exploitative experts is a challenge made in the context of their provisional friendship; he turns her piety on its end to make her think critically about the nature of her involvement in Khaufpur.When Nandy asks rhetorically “can we assume that colonialism truly ends when both colonizers and colonized acquire the psychological capacity to see colonialism as a more embarrassing or humiliating memory for the former colonizers?” he is perhaps posing a question parallel to the one Animal poses to Elli (Sinha 264). Rather than taking on humility as a disabled person from a marginal community within a marginalized nation, Animal makes Elli feel the stigma as a Westerner and a doctor, citing these as the degraded identities. Disabled, gay author Firdaus Kanga also presents a narrative of counter-​humiliation in his fictional bildungsroman Trying to Grow (1989). Trying to Grow begins with the narrator Brit being taken to the faith-​healer Wagh Baba by his father, Sam, who seeks a cure for Brit’s incurable osteo imperfecta. This healer, like the other specialists Brit’s father consults, proves to be a swindler and an abuser. Brit is made to endure many “mumbo-​jumbo” interventions, which include being made to drink powdered pearls and eat the bone marrow of a goat, and is subjected to the weird ministrations of the quack healer Rutty Regina (Kanga 4). Although the child Brit is subject to humiliation in these encounters with false healers, the adult-​narrating Brit shapes the narrative in such a manner that it is the father who cannot accept “a stunted cripple,” rather than the stunted cripple, who is disgraced (Kanga 39) In this fiction (as well as his later nonfictional book Heaven on Wheels (1991), Kanga reverses the pattern observed by G. Thomas Couser in his work on disability and life writing, wherein the parents of disabled caregivers violate their children’s autonomy by writing their lives: Brit, and later the autobiographical Kanga, obtains both financial and personal autonomy by assuming license to write about his parent-​caregivers. Brit’s progressive alienation from his father begins in early adolescence, and is readily evident in a punishment meted out by his father which fails to have the desired effect: Then he spanked me and spanked me and spanked me and said I was cheeky, and I said “is that all? I’m not scared, you know.” I really wasn’t because spanking was to a 164

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fracture what a firework is to the A-​bomb. Besides, I wanted to laugh, because every time Sam brought his hand down he hesitated, looking for a target that wouldn’t crack. (Kanga 52) Brit counter-​humiliates his father, both in the scene and again in the act of recounting it, turning his father’s hesitation and uncertainty about how to handle his disabled son against him. While Elli is often successful in adapting her expectations when she is challenged by Animal, Brit’s father is not successful in adapting to the fact that he has a disabled son. This subverted spanking is a turning point for Brit, and after this encounter, Brit’s father stops bringing home healers, having lost the authority to mortify (hurt and embarrass) his son. Later in adolescence, when Brit’s queerness comes to light, his father disapproves, but there is no longer any question of his demanding that his son change what he cannot change. Brit has established his autonomy through superior force of character.

Conclusion The nascent politics of Trying to Grow are at evidence in its bad doctors, the faith healers: Kanga demonstrates distain for precolonial Indian culture throughout the novel. Healers imagined by Kanga as belonging to the precolonial world are the vehicle for an expression of scorn, much as doctors become metonyms for capitalist violence from Animal’s point of view. In the patriarchal doctor-​suitor of Desai, the well-​meaning but ineffectual father-​doctor of Lahiri, and the corrupt doctors of Mistry and Rushdie, physicians make manifest larger political realities in their relationship with or attitudes towards disability and disabled characters. These authors create in wrongheaded doctors a metaphor for various flawed systems of regulating or organizing human life as they narrate the subjective experience of post-​Nehruvian Indian history. Even as disabled characters are at times stereotyped or co-​opted in service of other concerns, they by and large function to show up the violence of authoritarians in the imposition their reductive beliefs. Rather than docile bodies to be assailed in the course of their metaphorical function, disabled characters provide the energetic center of narrative and direct a social critique that is most often not merely metaphorized upon the disabled body, but thought through with disabled subjectivity as its interpretive center.

Notes With thanks to Dr Shane Neilson for diagnosing Bibi Haldar’s miraculous recovery.

Works cited Anjaraia, Ulka. “Introduction:  Literary Pasts, Presents and Futures” in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaraia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp.1–​30. Ben-​Yishai, Ayelet and Eit an Bar-​Yosef. “Emergency Fictions” in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaraia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp.162–​176. Barker, Clare and Stuart Murray. “Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol.4, no.3, 2010, pp.219–​36. Chatterjee, Chandra.“The ‘UnfetteredVacuum’: a Postcolonial Reading of Anita Desai’s Journey to Ithaca and Fasting, Feasting” in Convergences and Interferences: Newness in Intercultural Practices. Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2001, pp.121–​32. Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life-​writing. London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Desani, G.V. All About H Hatterr. London: The Saturn Press, 1949 (1945). Desai, Anita. Clear Light of Day. London: Heinemann, 1980.

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Stephanie Yorke —​—​—​. “The Timid Movement of a Wing” in Anita Desai:  Critical Perspectives, ed. Devindra Kohl and Melanie Maria Just. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2008, pp.19–​21. Garden, Rebecca. “Sympathy, Disability, and the Nurse: Female Power in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree.” Journal of Medical Humanities, vol.31, no.3, 2010, pp.223–​42. Gopal, Priyamvada. The Indian English Novel:  Nation, History, and Narration. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Identification in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Herndon: State University of New York Press, 2000. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Abingdon: Routledge, 2001. Kanga, Firdaus. Trying to Grow. London: Bloomsbury, 1989. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies: Stories of Boston, Bengal, and Beyond. New York: Harper Collins. 1999. Kipling, Rudyard. The Complete Supernatural Stories of Kipling, ed. Peter Haining. London: W.H. Allen, 1987. Meekosha, Helen. “Decolonising Disability: Thinking and Acting Globally.” Disability and Society, vol.26, no.6, 2011, pp.667–​82. Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995. Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Morton, Stephen. Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Mukherjee, Pablo. “‘Tomorrow There Will Be More of Us:’ Toxic Postcoloniality in Animal’s People” in Postcolonial Ecologies:  Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Nandy, Ashis. “Humiliation: The Politics and Cultural Psychology of the Limits of Human Degradation” in The Indian Postcolonial:  A Critical Reader, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri. Routledge: Abingdon, 2011, pp.261–​76. Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. Centenary Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 (1946). Prakash, Gyan. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Premchand (Rai, Dhanpat). The World of Premchand:  Selected Short Stories, trans. David Rubin. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness:  Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2007. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Toronto: Random House, 1981. —​—​—​. The Moor’s Last Sigh. New York: Knopf, 1995. Sinha, Indra. Animal’s People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. Sorensen, Eli Park. “Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry” in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaraia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp.193–​206. ten Kortenaar, Neil. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Montreal: Queen’s-​McGill University Press, 2004. van Bever Donker, Vincent. Recognition and Ethics in World Literature:  Religion, Violence, and the Human. Munich: Ibidem, 2016.

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14 DISABILITY AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE Antinormative narratives of embodiment David T. Mitchell I would tell all the stories I knew in which people went wrong but the nervous system was right all along. Rich 293

Introduction: antinormative narratives of embodiment In this analysis of disability and contemporary literature we group together some contemporary novelistic approaches to disability as an outline of alternative traditions taking shape wherein the representation of disability explicitly mutates into alternative capacities of living. One quick example will suffice to get this argument off the ground: the crippled boy at the end of Robert Brownings’s The Pied Piper of Hamlin (1842) cannot keep up with his fellow able-​bodied peers as they follow the piper’s mesmerizing music to their deaths in the river.The hypnotic tune works a revenge upon the townspeople by the piper for not being paid as promised for ridding the town of rats.Yet, while others fall to their doom in the river, the crippled boy’s inability to keep up with his peer group preserves him and exposes what we call the unexpected “capacity of incapacity” against which social orders often narrate themselves in various exterminatory logics. Novels which trade on such ironies of incapacity will be referred to throughout this chapter as “antinormative narratives of embodiment.” Such works of narrative, performative, poetic, media, and theatrical range represent crip/​queer bodies as productive difference in order to reveal ways to approach peripheral embodiment as akin to when queer theorist Kevin Floyd describes being queer as a “certain kind of skilled labor” (155). Taken collectively, these narratives provide a repertoire of tools to expose examples of what Darwin called in Origins of the Species (1859) “descent with modification” (the random, mutating path of evolution that links all organisms to a shared evolutionary history of ancestral structures and potentially adaptive futures) (378). Antinormative narratives of embodiment represent forms of literary adaptation moving consciously away from traditions of representational deployments of disability as a metaphor of individual and/​ or social collapse bereft of insights into disability’s material conditions as we analyze in Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000). Here we want to examine the advent of alternative neoliberal narrative spaces as allowing a certain kind of movement –​some “room for maneuver” in narrative theorist Ross Chambers’s terms –​toward an alternative resistant, representational tradition of those living lives in peripheral embodiments (3). 167

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Within the antinormative narrative of embodiment, plot turns increasingly rely on the revelation of the normative body’s secreted “dysfunctionality,” the perennial operations of embodiment that cover over in-​built biological inefficiency, disjuncture, weakness, and incapacity. In order to reverse the usual line of diagnosis imposed upon disabled bodies, these narratives emphasize normalcy as reliant on a mechanistic adherence to scripts of pathology in other bodies to maintain fictive foothold on formulas of normative embodiment. Within embodied scripts of normativity the disabled body is culturally positioned as a derivative identity, secondary and inferior to socially inscribed norms of ablebodiedness. In the parlance of new disability materialisms, we might say that within neoliberalism disability operates in at least two distinct domains: (1) disability actively references the United States’ claims to global exceptionalism –​the inclusive adoption of policies toward disabled people as a sign of the nation’s embrace of diversity in neoliberalism; and (2) antinormative narratives of embodiment employ disability’s radical potential to unseat traditional understandings of normalcy as subject to(?) integrity, cognitive coherency, and typical functionality. The first mode involves disability as a sign of neoliberalism’s tolerance of difference (i.e., a rhetoric of inclusionism realized by claims to American exceptionalism); the second mode unveils the capacities of incapacity that disability embodies as a key strategy in the antinormative narrative of embodiment’s neomaterialist revelation of imperfection as a creative, biological force. It is important to state at the start that this is not a euphemistic strategy wherein disability’s defining undesirability is covered over by less objectifying terminology and insincere public sentiment; rather these works (and for the purposes of this chapter we will only be working with Anglophone contemporary novels of the past 35 years: Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations [1993], Stanley Elkins’s The Magic Kingdom [1985], and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time [2004]) employ the unruly material agency of disabled bodies as a wellspring for creative interventions in social systems gone terribly awry. The readings that follow regarding the representational tactics of disability evolved within antinormative novels of embodiment explicate the creative agencies of crip/​queer materialities as instances of adaptive knowledge and strategies of the pursuit of being that exceed neoliberal normative scripts of tolerance for those “engaging [the] discrepant materialisms” of peripheral embodiments (Kruks 258).

Variations on variation Richard Powers’s 1993 novel, The Gold Bug Variations, tries to capture the haphazard process by which four basic genetic codings, “the building blocks of life,” result in complex human organisms founded on principles of diversity. Within neoliberal efforts to privatize collectively held resources, the Human Genome Project’s attempt to copyright a normative map of genetics stands as exemplary. Powers’s novel exposes not only the fallacy of such an undertaking, but also why it would miss the very point of genetic diversity as an engine that produces so many organismic variations (i.e., mutations). As one of the novel’s characters, the geneticist Dr.  Ressler, explains: “We like to think of nature as unerring. In reality, everything it does is an approximate mistake” (606). We might refer to Ressler’s theory as neomaterialist in the sense that it recognizes transcription errors as a more fully agential expression of life than its biopolitical ableist corollary, perfectly controlled repetition, which supplies the background for a mechanistic, deterministic, and automaton-​like genetic sequencing process as desirable. This reading’s emphasis on variation rather than sameness intends to overwrite Fordist assembly line concepts of heredity as efficiency regulating the generation of species normativity. The mutation thesis at the heart of Gold Bug, that genetic mass production produces accidents resulting in large-​and small-​scale biological variations, situates the plot in the transitional 168

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historical moment of the 1950s, a period characterized by the competitive international scientific search for the double helix. Additionally, the 1950s lay at the cusp of a transition from liberal humanism to neoliberal biopolitics. While liberalism and neoliberalism involve efforts to engineer predictive patterns of human biology, neoliberalism encourages tightly bounded forms of difference to emerge out of inherently dynamic, heterogeneous, developmental processes. Variation, for Powers, turns the weakness of homogeneous production systems (that is, the objective of reigning in threats of difference in actively maintaining the elusive stability of standardization) into the creative basis for organismic transformation rather than replicability. What Elizabeth Grosz says of Darwin’s concept of variation might also be said of Powers’s novelistic method as well: “the continuity of life through time…is not the transmission of invariable or clearly defined characteristics over regular, measurable periods of time (as various essentialisms imply), but the generation of endless variation, endless openness to the accidental, the random, the unexpected” (Nick of Time 7). At one point in Gold Bug, the protagonist, Jan, stares at her uncle, Jimmy, now recovering in a hospital bed following a massive brain hemorrhage. Pointedly, the stroke occurs while Jimmy subjects himself to a medical examination by doctors representing the health insurance policy sponsored by the company for which he works. The exam is required to solidify his right to a disability claim and also to approve the reinstatement of his life insurance policy after he inadvertently misses a monthly premium payment just prior to his stroke. From the standpoint of the insurance company, a missed premium results is a fortuitous error in a regulating system of repetition (the monthly payment schedule), and as such provides a rationale that allows health coverage to be denied (the paid product to be withheld). With a researcher’s impulse to bury embodiment’s unwanted alterations in abstraction, Jan runs to the medical library in order to read about prognoses of recovery from a stroke. Like Auguste Adoné (played by Nick Nolte) in Lorenzo’s Oil (1992) –​a film that would easily fall into this classification of neoliberal narratives of antinormative embodiment –​when the protagonist is overcome by the degree of pathologizing language used to characterize his son’s disability diagnosis in a medical encyclopedia, Jan becomes quickly overwhelmed by the negativity of the pathological catalogues she encounters: There was aphasia, loss of speech, alexia, loss of reading, agraphia, loss of writing, and agnosia, loss of recognition. Everything a person possessed could be taken away…I grabbed at every slight ray of optimism. Children’s brains could re-​wire, recover from blows that would wipe out mature adults…I was so high strung that I even found, hidden in the technical folds, rare benefits from a well-​placed lesion. Violent personalities woke up from apoplexy as loving as a newborn. Pasteur’s massive stroke altered his work for the better. Dostoevsky’s visionary power followed from lifelong epileptic seizures. Research proved nothing except that no one could predict injury’s outcome. (544; our italics) Reading the medical records, a field whose pace “consigned all texts to the pyre every two years,” leaves Jan with a feeling of ambiguous guilt in “hoping for [a]‌kinder, comprehensive solution” (544). Her catalog of miraculous biological repairs and historical rescues from impairment read like a search for alternative positive potentials regarding disability outcomes. The list takes on the case of a catalog of productive potentials consistent with early efforts by disability studies in the humanities to reclaim disability as something other than pathology and biological deviance. In the wake of giving up on a way to return Jimmy to his former self, Jan remembers an insight passed on to her by Ressler: “the nervous system is like a language; 169

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the circuitry remains active, historically dynamic while appearing on the surface to be fixed and unchanging” (543). The memory of this point about subterranean alterations and re-​routings of neural networks enables Jan to read beyond what she initially encounters as Uncle Jimmy’s ruined body –​“His face had collapsed on one side, as if from a bad foundation. His mouth sagged down to the left, an eighty-​year-​old’s mouth, unable to produce anything more than a few raw vowels” (541). Rather than revulsion at embodiment’s complete jettisoning of able-​ bodied mastery over its own operations, Jan resists placing Jimmy among the inhuman despite his medical classification as a “vegetable.” In turn, she is able to reimagine an active life reorganizing itself beneath the topography of an apparently destroyed surface. The novel’s plot ultimately turns upon this very revelation as Jimmy marshals the monosyllables of speech left behind by stroke into “crucial bits of information –​passwords, memory locations, patch names  –​that until then had been the secret domain of the Operations Manager” of the insurance company (576). Ironically, the “data bits” provided by Jimmy allow Ressler to unlock a heavily guarded computer network and sabotage it through random messages sent to employees of the insurance company about the unethical practices of their employer. The fact that hacking into a computer system requires expertise in binomial commands (I and O binaries) means that Jimmy’s monosyllabic utterances turn out to be exactly fitted to the job. In a turn becoming increasingly foundational to the alternative workings of the antinormative novel of embodiment, the computer hacking ultimately enables the geneticist to blackmail a corporate profiteer of neoliberal health care coverage into paying for the costs of Jimmy’s hospitalization and life-​long recovery. We call this surprise revelation of an unexpected alternative capacity at the foundation of disability:  the “capacities of incapacity.” The capacities of incapacity underwriting the representational innovations of the antinormative novel primarily turn on the identification of an alternative approach to representations of nonnormative materiality as agentive (“lively” in the parlance of neomaterialisms) rather than passively inscribed as deviant within medical rubrics of pathology and dysfunctionality. The constitution of disability and other alternative materialities as bodies that fail in their normative scripts relies on notions of embodied privilege within neoliberal biopower. These formulas of able-​bodied desirability (and its constitutive alternative, crip/​queer embodiment’s inherent undesirability) depend on a decidedly constructivist notion of life as organized around predictive anxieties of what bodies will prove worthy to “let live” within the decidedly indeterminate futures of biopolitics which should be allowed to “take life” (Foucault 136). The capacities of incapacity help to demonstrate why normative concepts of embodiment rest on an ability to anticipate what bodies will pay off if more resources are poured into their potentials at the expense of those consigned to less productive, under-​ resourced existences. Within our notion of the capacities of incapacity the matter and materiality of bodies come to the fore with greater prominence and institutes what Rosi Braidotti calls a “biocentered egalitarianism” (204). A neomaterialist-​based, biocentered egalitarianism approaches disability as instances of varied embodiment that openly rework crip/​queer bodies through a more active notion of subjectivity as a negotiation of “life-​forces” (204). The capacities of incapacity disconnect and re-​operationalize the binary relationship between ability and disability into less oppositional modes of interaction. “Alternative ecologies of belonging both in kinship systems and in forms of social and political participation” are inaugurated with respect to alternative ways of being-​in-​the-​world as disabled and as a more open grappling with the indeterminate expressions of biological multiplicity that vulnerable embodiment represents (Braidotti 204). Fully in line with Braidotti’s claims, our approach refuses more evaluative approaches to mutation that mark some materialities as inherently undesirable, unproductive, and predictively 170

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selective. Biocentered egalitarianism discounts the utility of the neoliberal question regarding which bodies will prove most productive in the future (if, in fact, productivity will remain an oppressive measure of usefulness for bodies within neoliberal biopolitics). Thus, in the Gold Bug example, the insurance employee, Uncle Jimmy, loses his own coverage and his employer argues that his decision to let his payment lapse at an untimely moment removes the corporate responsibility of covering his hospitalization costs. In History of Madness (1961), Foucault points out that the one constant in the incoherent history of conceptions of madness is the practice of banishing alterity and then turning around to condemn the banished person on the basis of his/​her culpability for choosing exclusion (507). The utilitarian logic of refusing coverage on the basis of making Jimmy responsible for losing his own medical coverage to begin with (this charge is effectively a charge of the individual mismanagement of his health care needs), is later offset by Ressler’s hacking of the employee communication web by sending out sporadic messages about ethical quandaries produced by the for-​profit provision of health care insurance industry: “Would you mind if your major medical coverage was dropped? Enter Y or N to continue” (Powers 617). A  later follow-​up strand of information pertaining more directly to Jimmy’s situation appears on company screens as “A stroke victim is about to be cut loose” (Powers 618). Ressler’s transition from genetic decoder to computer hacker (another kind of decoding as a form of disability-​based resistance), in other words, asks company employees if they would condone Jimmy’s treatment as an ethical choice by the company if it were applied to their own situation. Peripheral embodiment becomes a catalyst in this situation for other insurance industry employees to assess their complicity in an industry that depends on excluding people at the moment of their greatest need for health insurance. The neoliberal normalization of disability initiates a process of cultural rehabilitation on behalf of the few that inevitably operates at the expense of the many. Disability becomes an opportunity in antinormative novels of embodiment to contemplate complicity in unethical profiteering practices naturalized within neoliberalism as a kind of deterministic survival of the fittest. Without Jimmy’s stroke and Ressler’s intervention to make the disability event into a political cause, company business would continue as usual through the unwitting complicity of Jimmy’s fellow laborers in denying consumers access to the very immaterial product (i.e., health insurance) they were presumably in the business of mass producing. Further, Jimmy’s monosyllabic cracking of the company’s computer code proves advantageous to a public restoration of cause and effect –​the profit motive in health insurance is exposed as a logic of what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” (137). Profits amass in the insurance industry as the company promotes as many rationales as possible for reasons why it doesn’t have to provide the product consumers have already paid for at the moment they attempt to access it.

Bodies falling away from true Whereas Powers’s Gold Bug Variations explores the diversity of systems at the base of neural networks and cybernetic chains, Stanley Elkins’s novel The Magic Kingdom (1985) takes on the task of staging disability itself as an overarching classification beneath which varieties of alternative embodiments thrive. The unusual assembly of a group of disabled characters –​as opposed to the much more common individuation model involving a singular protagonist navigating impairments –​parallels the surprise one might experience at running across a plurality of disabled people in public. Outside of day-​home field trips for residents to the mall one day a month, special adaptive screenings of movies on specified days at theaters, or the passing of a short bus with disabled charges, we rarely encounter assemblies of people with disabilities 171

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in public. Their plurality is hidden as intensely as the individuation of their conditions within the larger diagnostic rubrics of medicine. Without visible multiplicities of disabled people in public spaces disability largely remains comprehended as exceptional, rare, isolated, and disastrous divergences from able-​bodiedness. At the center of Elkins’s antinormative novel of embodiment is the narrative explication of a multiplicity of disability perspectives, a plurality that nuances experiences of peripheral embodiments within the rarity of a multipronged, pluripotent, collective point of view. The novel sets into motion a neomaterialist impulse that nuances experiences of disability within the subpopulation of a group of nonaligned, jaded, ethnically and class differentiated, diversely embodied disabled youth. The Magic Kingdom operationalizes peripheral embodiments as an opportunity to explore the alternative subjectivities wrought by navigating the world as disabled people. In the words of Jason Edwards, “What binds a group together as a ‘class,’ and thus provides it with a capacity for transformative agency, is a set of material practices involved in everyday life and the experience of lived space” (295). The group of disabled youth in Elkins’s novel evaluate their lives back in the U.K. as relatively nauseating given their abandonment to grueling forms of medical experimentation and socially imposed experiences of isolation. At the same time, the disabled collectivity believes a trip to Disney World is the last thing they need as a respite from ceaseless regimes of treatment –​the two experiences come to seem two sides of the same neoliberal coin.The defensive comments made by parents to their son Liam, who is dying from terminal cancer when he critiques the idea of Disney as the destination for his own memorialization, sum up the anemic deflections offered in the face of the collective skepticism felt by all of the crip/​queer participants: It isn’t as if this trip were your memorial or anything. Of course not. What, are you kidding? A clambake in Florida? A binge on the roundabout? A spree at the fun fair? Your memorial? You think your mum and I would turn something like that into a great bloody red-​letter day or go skylarking about like nits in the pump room? I’m shocked I am you should think so, well and truly shocked. (Elkins 95) A field trip of freaks that feels like a requiem for lives hurried into their status as corpses hardly qualifies as the fulfillment of this disabled group’s make-​a-​wish post-​adolescent desires. Elkins, who experienced much of his adult life with multiple sclerosis, opens up the disability experience as a phantasm of able-​bodied projections that infantilize the participants well beyond childhood. Normative embodiment can offer no viable narrative of disability futurity outside the parameters of a reduced version of its own homogenizing imaginings. Yet, over the course of the novel, the group transforms itself through modes of collective agency based on the insights derived from making active comparisons and contrasts between divergent disability experiences.Through Elkins’s efforts to imagine alternative worlds in which they won’t feel so rejected, the motley crew of crip/​queer youth scratches beneath the surface of the Magic Kingdom’s simulacra of supports for disabled visitors. As the able-​bodied make-​ a-​wish team leader, Eddy Bale, realizes immediately upon arriving in Orlando, Florida, in the midst of a freak snowstorm, the charity trip was ill-​conceived at best. If neoliberalism promises to deliver all bodies into the experience of collectively shared pleasures, then a group of disabled kids should revel in the opportunity to be like their able-​bodied others.Yet, in focusing on the normative use of Disney as one that would prop up the disabled group’s spirits, Bale misses the more worthwhile aesthetic aspects in the freakish event –​the “accidental, unintentioned beauty of the storm, by way of the blind blizzard, happened, like paint in milk” (Elkins 93). 172

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The surprising mixing of “the blind blizzard” that turns Disney into something more akin to the tundra of northern Europe where they come from results in revelations of an alternative aesthetic landscape. The disabled group’s experience in Orlando results in a variety of immersions into unexpected scenes of strange beauty that result from nonnormative bodies using the simulated terrain of Disney World in alternative ways. For instance, Janet Order’s aortic transposition –​ the reversal of the usual routes of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood –​gives her skin a decidedly blue cast. In order to better conform (i.e., pass as nondisabled) Janet spends much of her time thinking up specific cultural activities in which her blue body will fit in more seamlessly: Janet Order looked forward to her dreams. In these dreams she’d found an infinite number of ways in which she was able to take on a sort of protective coloration… There were thousands of ways to protect herself. She dreamed of blue populations in blue towns and blue cities. She dreamed of herself cold and at peace in water, her lips and face blue in the temperature. Or exposed on a beach, blue and drowned. (68) Janet’s dreams here are not particularly fantastical. She is not transported to fantasy landscapes yet to be realized unlike the pretension of the amusement park she is about to visit. Instead she imaginatively travels through a variety of culturally specific ethnic practices that offer the promise of a more flexible environment of acceptance (“alternative ecologies of belonging” in Braidotti’s terms 204) beyond the promise of passing –​a place where a blue girl can participate without the need for extraordinary efforts of social concealment within neoliberal inclusionist practices. Not only do the disabled protagonists remain actively attentive to local ethnic and racialized culture alternatives, but they also look longingly to alternatives offered by species other than humans. In largely eschewing rights-​ based models of normalization as liberation, Elkins and other antinormative novelists of embodiment avoid merely documenting moments of stigmatized embodiment encountering social barriers. Instead, disability provides an opportunity to explore rejected embodiments as creative deviations in materiality itself. For Elkins, the point is not to map the insufficiency of normative imaginings about disability (although this happens throughout the book), but rather to bestow an artful agency demanded by bodies as they navigate environments engineered to accommodate narrow aesthetic and functional norms. Disney World, with its entirely human-​made simulations of idealized landscapes, turns out to be –​in the most Baudrillardian sense –​a complete failure of accessibility (Baudrillard 1). After combating the dispiriting effects of inaccessible rides, condescending staff attitudes, the rudeness of nondisabled travelers mashing their way through crowds, and encounters with “mute” characters that turn out to be the neoliberal equivalent to popular consumption’s carpetbaggers, the queer male nurse, Colin Bible, takes the entire disabled troupe to the afternoon parade down Main Street USA. In order to better combat the unavailability of Disney World to serve as a hideout –​a place of integration –​for those with diverse embodiments. In doing so, Colin uses the imperfections on display in the assembly of consumptive parade-​watchers to alter the group’s deepening depression over their capacity to transcend the limits of their incapacities. Rather than bring them to the hardscape of an accepting, diverse environment (a promise that Disney World makes but completely fails to deliver in its neoliberal transcendence of diversity in normalization), Colin decides to bring the always-​already diverse environment to the attentions of his disabled charges in order to demonstrate that their incapacities have openly marked the all-​too-​human topographies of which they are a part: 173

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“It breaks your heart,” Colin said. “Imperfection everywhere, everywhere My God, children, we look like we’re dressed for the horseback! (And everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, there’s this clumsy imbalance.You see these old, sluggish bodies on thin-​ looking legs, like folk carrying packages piled too high. Or like birds puffed out, skewed, out of sorts with their foundations.) And hair. Hair thins, recedes, is gone. Bodies fall away from true, I don’t know. It’s as if we’ve been nickel-​and-​dimed by the elements; by erosion, by wind and water, by the pull of gravity and the oxidation of the very air.” (223; our italics) Colin’s perspective, informed by his adoption of the gender-​troubling role of queer male nursemaid to this crip/​queer ensemble, gives voice to what might pass as the closest thing to a thesis of the antinormative novel of embodiment: that is, that “bodies fall away from true.” The “failure” of normative expectations is “everywhere, everywhere” in that embodiment makes us radically open to the vicissitudes of vulnerability, the mutating manifestations of genetic coding errors, the gradual descent into forms of degeneration that prove nothing more than materiality’s inconstancy –​the dynamic drift of ever-​present, yet not necessarily conscious, transformations of corporeality. Within this alternative narrative scheme, normative embodiment is the ruse of engineering an active repression against the dynamic contingencies of embodiment. The espousal of this perspective places Colin squarely in a tradition of those who lose hope in order to gain the wisdom of a “spongy relation to life, culture, knowledge, and pleasure,” something akin to Halberstam’s notion of the “queer art of failure” (2). Rather than “succeed” by a false approximation of norms –​that which Colin refers to as the artificiality of “the true” –​ the queer art of failure “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods” (3). Within this formulation we might understand Colin’s demonstration project at the Disney World parade of anomalous characters as an embodiment of those who fall short of “orderly and predictable adulthoods.” Except the cast of anomalous characters on display becomes constituted as the audience of imperfect human characters sharing in a spectacle of difference. Attention moves, in this context, from the parade of difference represented by freakish cartoon characters to the imperfections of embodiment represented by onlookers positioned as normative. The revelation leaves the children’s differences fully intact. Rather than normalizing their experiences of embodiment in false approximations of how they, through a twist of political correctness or inclusionist rhetoric, fit into normative expectations of embodiment, Colin Bible explains how a lack of fitness is the more epiphanic common denominator of the world. The antinormative novel of embodiment comes of age as revelatory of alternatives to normative ways of living based on a more superficial version of diversity.

Like okapi in the jungle A similar revelation of the incapacities of normative cognition can be found in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time, wherein his protagonist, Christopher, who could be described as existing on the autistic spectrum, explains his experience of nonnormative consciousness similarly to that of Mark Schluter who is diagnosed with Capgras syndrome in Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker as an overattentiveness to small details. According to Christopher, going into a field of cows results in a level of observation that cannot be accommodated by normative models of “rational” description: 174

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there were 31 more things in this list of things I noticed but Siobhan said I didn’t need to write them all down. And it means that it is very tiring if I  am in a new place because I see all these things, and if someone asked me afterward what the cows looked like, I could ask which one. (142) Like Powers’s antinormative characterization strategy, Haddon’s formulation of alternative cognition patterns for those on the autistic spectrum reveals a universe of “excessive diversity,” if it is possible to use the phrase in a more productive sense, one where loss is revealed as residing in those clinging to reductivist principles of normative consciousness, a form of knowing perhaps best described as ways of not knowing. At one key point in the novel Christopher diagnoses this problem in those with normative cognition capacities as “glancing”: “But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bumping off something and carrying on in almost the same direction, e.g., when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball. And the information in their head is really simple” (140). So, in one respect this attention to an abundance of details marks one aspect of the capacities of incapacity involved in autistic cognition; in another respect the need to reduce one’s susceptibility to overstimulating situations also fuels ways to imagine alternative disability universes. Myriad examples of locating more hospitable ecologies in order to wall off excess detail occur throughout the novel, such as when Christopher puts his hands over his ears, closes his eyes, and rolls forward until hunched up with his forehead pressed onto the grass when physically accosted by another (4); or when he crawls between the wall of the shed, the fence, and the rainwater tub and covers himself with a fertilizer sack to hide after discovering his father is the murderer of the neighbor’s dog, Wellington (127); or when he escapes from a policeman by stowing his body on a luggage shelf during a train ride to London to live with his mother.These activities of shut down, stimming, and self-​isolation in tiny places demonstrate the extent to which Christopher actively shrinks the circumference of his interactions with humans in order to protect himself from normate onslaughts. Further, Christopher pursues a variety of cross-​ species identifications in his pursuit of alternative ecologies within which he might flourish in his crip/​queer capacities of being. Throughout the novel he likens his existence to other animals that enjoy being alone, identifying asociality as a viable option for one who experiences interactions with others as a barrier: “And eventually there is no one left in the world except people who don’t look at other people’s faces… .And they like being on their own and I hardly ever see them because they are like okapi in the jungle in the Congo, which are a kind of antelope and very shy and rare” (198–​ 99). The queer/​crip poet Eli Clare (a transgender man with cerebral palsy) declares similarly in the film, Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer (2005): “I don’t like being around people. I’ve always led a somewhat willful existence where being alone in Nature is preferable to interacting with other humans.” Such expressions of alternative pleasures found in isolation from humans who compose an inaccessible space where interaction with others is the barrier expose ways of being that would find inclusionism a source of oppression rather than liberation.

The capacities of incapacity The antinormative novel of embodiment privileges disability as a failure of realizing expectations of normalcy, a source of innovation that runs consciously counter to sociality’s insistence on the all-​encompassing power of stigmatizing cultural inscriptions.To be clear, this alternative approach to disability is not a story of overcoming where the limited body exceeds its social expectations in an approximation of normative modes of relating to the world; nor is its representational 175

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mechanism one that uses disability as a metaphor for ailments that prove social rather than bodily (as does the story of female hysteria, for instance, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-​Paper”); and, perhaps most liberational of all, these are not inclusionist stories of the ways in which disabled people are rescued by their similarity to some abstract majority of others. The antinormative novel of embodiment surfaces with a version of nonnormative materiality that proves more innovative for its truthfulness to the “imperfections” (the coding errors and adaptive capabilities) of organicity than its more culturally performative normative cousins. In turn, these works also locate an overlooked creativity –​the skilled labor –​required of living with disabilities as the realization of forms of subjectivity that expand alternatives for living in the world. Whereas social constructionist-​based theories suppress the innovation supplied by corporeality in the name of antiessentialism, antinormative novels of embodiment revel in the degree to which fiction can deploy disability to demonstrate the insufficiency of social investments in normative stasis –​a defining feature of a desire for sameness residing at the foundation of neoliberal social domains created by inclusionist practices. The capacity of incapacity to which we are referring as an alternative, corporeal-​based methodology turns for its insight on a form of biological materialism reinterpreted as a critique of pathology’s normative referencing frame. This immanent materialist approach depends upon reimagining life as life, as that which can never be stable, that which must undergo change both in itself, at the level of individuals, and over generations, at the level of species or populations. Elizabeth Grosz’s poetic explication of alternative materialities might well be applied to the disabled lives occupying center stage in antinormative novels of embodiment: Matter is organized differently in its inorganic and organic forms; this organization is dependent on the degree of indeterminacy, the degree of freedom, that life exhibits relative to the inertia of matter, the capacity that all forms of life, in varying degrees, have to introduce something new. This something new, a new action, a new use of matter, a new arrangement or organization, is brought into existence not through complete immersion in matter but through the creation of a distance that enables matter to be obscured, to be cast in a new light, or rather, to have many of its features cast into shadow. (167) We end by offering this explanation of Grosz’s paraphrase of Darwin’s evolutionary method as a means for understanding the radical literary history of embodiment offered up by antinormative novels of embodiment. As an historical outcropping of narrative experiments, the antinormative novel of embodiment explicitly challenges neoliberalism’s insufficient embrace of disability as diversity. The antinormative novel of embodiment emerges in a post-​Fordist fetishistic expansion of the marketing of difference made available by neoliberal biopolitics extant in late liberalism. Such strategies of inclusion effectively undermine the material alternatives that queer and disabled bodies actually provide.The antinormative novel of embodiment’s most radical critique develops in an interim space, that which queer narrative theorist Ross Chambers refers to as oppositional narrative’s tactical exploitation of disability’s revelatory capacity to reveal incapacity as a viable alternative to the reification of the value of normativity.

Works cited Baudrillard, Jean. “Disneyworld Company.” Translated by Francois Devrix. Liberation. March 4,1996.

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Disability and contemporary literature Braidotti, Rosi. “The Politics of Life Itself and New Ways of Dying.” D. Coole & S. Frost (eds.), The New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010: 201–​18. Browning, Robert. The Pied Piper of Hamlin. Alcester: Pook Press, 2013. Chambers, Ross. Room for Maneuver:  Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1991. Darwin, Charles. The Origins of the Species By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: Murray, 1859. Edwards, Jason. “The Materialism of Historical Materialism.” D. Coole & S. Frost (eds.), The New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010: 281–​98. Elkins, Stanley. The Magic Kingdom. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000. Floyd, Kevin. The Reification of Desire:  Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Foucault, Michel. The History of Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy. New York: Routledge, 2006. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2004. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure (A John Hope Franklin Center Book). Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism (Clarendon Lectures in Geography and Environmental Science). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kruks, Sonia.“Engaging Discrepant Materialisms.” D. Coole & S. Frost (eds.). The New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010: 258–​80. Lorenzo’s Oil. Directed by George Miller. NBC Universal, 1993. 135 mins. Mitchell, David T. & Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Picador, 2007. —​—​—​. The Gold Bug Variations. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. Rich, Adrienne,“Pierot Le Fou,” Collected Poems, 1950–​2012. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer. Directed by Sharon L. Snyder. Brace Yourselves Productions, 2005. 32 mins.

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PART III

Poetry

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15 POET AND BEGGAR Edmund White’s Blindness Vanessa Warne

When British railway worker Edmund H.  White became blind in midlife in the 1850s, he needed a new way to support himself and his family. Having lost his railway job when he lost his sight, White considered becoming a public lecturer. He decided instead to become a poet, authoring a series of long poems that he published with the help of supporters who prepaid for copies of his books. His 1856 Blindness, A Discursive Poem in Five Cantos, written four years after he became blind, was published with the help of 126 subscribers. In it, White explores topics of general interest, such as abolition, the whaling industry and the reign of Queen Victoria. He also shares detailed accounts of his experience of blindness, including the poverty that threatened his family following his vision loss. This chapter takes up White’s Blindness in order to explore the role of poetry in a working-​ class man’s experience of acquired visual disability. I begin by exploring White’s negative portrayal of blindness as a personal tragedy. I move next to the publication of his poetry by subscription, a method nineteenth-​century authors with disabilities regularly employed. I follow with an analysis of White’s interweaving of the story of his disability with an homage to celebrated blind poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674). I argue that White’s poem is representative of blind, working-​class authors’ double identification with two culturally influential blind personas: on one hand, the blind poet understood as compensated for blindness by literary talent, and, on the other, the blind beggar who, excluded from paid employment by societal attitudes toward disability, was obliged to beg for a living.

Depicting visual disability In the five cantos of Blindness,White describes his life as a blind person and outlines unsuccessful attempts he made to secure charitable support for himself and his family prior to publishing his poem. Printed in London, where White lived, the book, which is 131 pages long, sold for half a crown. Written in heroic couplets, the poem at the book’s center is both prefaced by a prose introduction and explicated by seventeen pages of endnotes. In it, White identifies himself as a married man and a father; he also names people who have either aided him in adjusting to life with a visual disability or failed to respond to appeals he made for help. He consistently draws connections between his experience of acquired blindness and the challenges faced by other blind people, especially working-​class blind people, some of whom are, White laments, obliged 181

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to beg on the streets because they are excluded from employment and neither private charity nor state supports supply their basic needs. White was by no means alone in choosing poetry as a medium for exploring the experience of acquired disability. In his long poem The Genius of the Blind, published three years after Blindness, White praises influential predecessors such as Thomas Blacklock (1721–​91), a Scottish blind person and divinity scholar who published a collection of poems in 1756 by subscription. Blacklock, who did not write exclusively on the theme of blindness, did use poetry to share incidents in his life related to his blindness, such as a time he narrowly avoided falling into a well while on a walk (Blacklock 153). In The Genius of the Blind, White also praises less widely read blind poets, namely Edward Rushton, Turlagh Carolan, Dennis Hampson and Anna Williams. These authors were for White, as for other blind people, valued representatives of blind people’s poetic achievement, part of a long line of respected blind poets that, for White, stretched back to Homer, included the fictional Ossian, and was best represented by Milton. Though blind authors were figures of particular interest to blind people with literary aspirations, sighted people, both readers and authors, were also interested in blindness. The nineteenth-​ century history of depictions of blindness in American literary culture has been thoroughly explored by Mary Klages in her seminal study Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (1999). More recent is Heather Tilley’s Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing (2018), which examines the British history of the literary depiction of blindness, with attention to both blind authors, such as Frances Browne, and sighted authors, including Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Tilley includes White in her study of blind authors, noting the economic forces that prompted White to publish poetry and proposing that “[h]‌is texts grapple with the gap between experience of vision as seeing things in the present out there, and visual memory as a way of newly seeing things” (108). Whereas personal experience of blindness shapes White’s poetry, sighted authors imagine blindness and then assign the experience to the characters they depict. As Mary Wilson Carpenter has noted,“blinding the hero” (52) is a plot device employed by prominent Victorian authors such as Charlotte Brontë, whose novel Jane Eyre (1847) features both the blinding and maiming of its male protagonist Rochester. Rochester’s injuries are acquired in the destruction of his home and function as humbling punishments that prepare him for marriage to the novel’s eponymous heroine. As Carpenter and others note, sighted author Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856), published in the same year as White’s Blindness, also portrays the vision loss of a male protagonist. Not unlike Brontë’s Rochester, Romney Leigh becomes blind as a result of injuries acquired during the destruction of his ancestral home, his disability humbling him and preparing the way for his marriage to Aurora. As Julia Miele Rodas has demonstrated, Barrett Browning’s portrayal of Romney as a blind person has important connections to her real-​world friendship with Hugh Stuart Boyd, a scholar, poet and blind person who acted as Barrett Browning’s tutor in Greek. Analyzing both Barrett Browning’s correspondence and poems she wrote about Boyd and about blindness, Rodas links Barrett Browning’s attraction to Boyd with her perception of him as “pitiably blind” (Rodas 107). As Tilley shows in Blindness and Writing (2019), poets with complicated personal relationships to sight and blindness, such as William Wordsworth, also contributed to the literary conversation on blindness. Attentive to both Wordsworth’s literary depiction of blind people and his experience of chronic trachoma, Tilley has explored “the ways in which episodic visual impairment disrupted his relationship to literature” (41). While Wordsworth’s fluctuating relationship to the identity of blind poet is quite unique, his depiction of blind people in poetry is representative of his era. His commentary on blindness includes an influential depiction of a blind beggar in 182

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The Prelude (1805, 1850), a figure to whom nineteenth-​century poets repeatedly turned for an emotionally and philosophically engaging subject. As I have noted elsewhere, Wordsworth’s portrait of a blind beggar in The Prelude identifies blindness with immobility and passivity as well as with sensory difference (Warne, Nineteenth-​Century Disability, The Prelude). Suggesting the resilience of interest in this figure, at the end of the century, Arthur Symons, a sighted poet, created a comparable poetic portrait of an isolated blind man in a busy urban street, his hat held out to receive coins. His 1892 sonnet “The Blind Beggar” emphasizes the social isolation of the blind beggar and imagines his sensory difference as catastrophic. Indeed, Symons goes so far as to compare a blind person to a “dead man in his shroud” (36), an image that is central to both Symons’ identification of blindness with extreme deprivation and his depiction of blindness as a living death (Warne, Nineteenth-​Century Disability, “The Blind Beggar”). White, who experiences his blindness as a calamity, depicts visual disability in ways that are not dissimilar to Wordsworth and Symons, sighted people whose portraits of blindness have been much more widely read and studied than White’s. Indeed, White’s descriptions of his disability in Blindness are wholly consistent with dominant and deeply problematic cultural identifications of blindness with a living death and with physical pain. Following convention, White uses images of physical suffering and severe sensory deprivation, including live burial, to describe his life. He adds helplessness, poverty and social isolation to this characterization, aspects of the nineteenth-​century cultural perception and depiction of visual disability apparent in the period’s literature, medicine and visual art (Warne, “Blindness”). In the third canto of the poem, for example, White describes his blindness as a “dismal darkness” (33) and recalls moments when: …vainly have I strain’d My aching eyeballs o’er the pathless deep And felt an inward shudder o’er me creep, At my lone helplessness; such is the night That oft succeeds a day of dazzling light, And such the night, whose dark and awful gloom Attends the blind man in his living tomb. (33–​4) White repeats his equation of visual disability with death later in the poem in a lament for the visual beauty of the natural world: No more my eyes may view the vernal glade, Or spreading acres gorgeously array’d In summer vestments… No more when starry night her mantle spreads Beneath the Heav’ns, and all around her sheds From peopled planets in the realms above, A soft enchanting radiance of that love Jehovah bears to man, may I behold; For all to me is cheerless, dark, and cold As the abode of death. (64) White, for whom blindness is unambiguously tragic, draws here and elsewhere on culturally established identifications of blindness, if not with death, at least with interment. Using similar images to discuss the experiences of other blind people, White proposes in his Introduction 183

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that “in all parts of the united Empire, blindness falls like a dark funeral pall, enshrouding in its gigantic folds all the beauties and glories of Creation from the eyes of its victims, making the strong man and the beautiful woman alike, poor dependants on their more fortunate fellow creatures” (xvi). In the poem proper, White uses a personified figure of fortune to explain how his life has been changed by vision loss. He remembers how: “fortune’s frown /​Fell ruthlessly upon me, bore me down, /​And with a sudden blow, hurled at my head /​Perpetual darkness, and light vanished” (61). This image of assault encapsulates White’s feelings of powerlessness in relation to his loss of sight; it is also representative of his use of the language of bodily injury to describe a disability that did not, in fact, result from an injury to his body. While workplace accidents were a common cause of blindness in nineteenth-​century Britain, White attributes his blindness to his witnessing of an accident in which he was not physically harmed. While working as a guard at Teignmouth Station, he tried to protect a woman named Ellis from injury by stopping her as she attempted to board a moving train. He recalls how, despite his efforts, “her cloak or foot became entangled in the carriage wheel, and she was whirled with frightful rapidity from my grasp, and in a moment she was dead, and her brains scattered over the metals” (109). White chooses to apostrophize Ellis at several points in his poem as, for example, when he describes her attempt to re-​board her train: …even now I see thee stand before me, view thy brow, Mark every feature of thy lovely face, As smilingly, thou with the train did’st race On that sad day when warning was in vain To check thy footstep, or thee to restrain. (62) White expresses his sympathy for Ellis when he describes a brief period of blindness that he experienced at the scene of the accident: “I sprang up and rushed to the edge of the platform, but the shock had proved too much for me, and I  was blind. Gradually, however, my sight returned (but never so strong as before) and I beheld the wheel resting on the poor girl’s neck” (109). White will attribute his permanent blindness both to the initial shock of witnessing this death and to the cumulative effect of his visual memories of it. He explains, “[t]‌his dreadful occurrence had such a severe effect on me that for months afterwards, the smiling face of that poor girl by day and night haunted me; […] after several months’ bodily anguish and mental anxiety […] without the slightest pain my sight failed me” (109). White adds in a note that he consulted medical professionals who agreed his blindness originated in damage done to his optic nerve by witnessing Ellis’ death, damage White understands as a kind of paralysis. While the actual cause of White’s blindness may not have been known to White and cannot be known to us, his perception of a causal link between visual trauma and vision loss reveals his understanding of sight as a sense that is vulnerable not only to disease and physical injury but also to the trauma of witnessing. When White shares painful visual memories of Ellis’s death, he does so partly to express his sympathy for her and partly to elicit sympathy for himself, both for his vision loss and for the emotional pain caused by the visual memories that haunt him. This is the case when White contrasts Ellis’ sudden death with his own experience of blindness as a living death: Again I view thee as the carriage wheel Upon thy neck was pressing, made me feel A shudd’ring sensation o’er me creep, 184

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At thy sad fate; but thou in peace doth sleep Within the narrow confines of the grave, While I in darkness a cold world must brave, No more may I behold the glorious light Of bright aurora, or the queen of night, Whose silver beams upon the waters lie, Or those bright stars that gem the darken’d sky. (62) After comparing Ellis’ peaceful sleep with his prolonged suffering, White turns to his loss of a job that he enjoyed, repeating the lament “No more” when he reflects how: “No more may I within the railway train, /​Swift as an eagle dart o’er hill and plain, /​Or through the bowels of the cavern’d rock /​Speed like the wind” (63). Several pages later, White apostrophizes Ellis on the topic of the financial hardship he endures in the wake of her death: “Such Ellis is the fate, that o’er me hangs, /​Increased in anguish by the blighting fangs of poverty /​Who feels a brand, like Cain, upon his brow” (67). White documents the facts of Ellis’ tragic death with empathy but also with his own losses in mind: his loss of vision and the end of his employment with the railway. As the next section in this chapter proposes, the financial implications of his unemployment, for himself and his family, shape White’s poem.

The blind beggar Writing in 1846, an anonymous contributor to the London Journal complained about rhymes written on the pavement by beggars, dismissing them as hackneyed. The contributor gives as an example the work of a disabled sailor who sits and begs beside a chalked couplet that reads:  “The ocean I’ve crossed /​My limb I  have lost” (“On Beggars” 294). The patter of street beggars, spoken equivalents of chalked phrase, could also take the form of a recited poem that, like a written note or placard displayed by a disabled person, shared information about an individual’s disability, such as whether the disability was congenital or had been caused by illness or an accident. As Martha Stoddard Holmes has shown, journalist Henry Mayhew’s interviews with members of London’s working-​class blind population for his four-​ volume study London Labour and the London Poor (1851–​61) include references to blind people’s use of poetry to make a living in the streets. Holmes notes, for example, a rhymed lament recited by a blind boot-​lace seller in which the seller describes himself as a prisoner “bound in dismal darkness” (“Working” 40). Holmes describes this lament as a “performance of affliction, presented in the exact terms that will elicit sympathy without suspicion” (“Working” 41). According to Holmes, the evidence of Mayhew’s interviews with disabled street sellers and beggars reveals that some disabled people worked strategically “within the emotional economy of disability” and put mainstream views about disability and disabled people “to work” (“Working” 42).Thus, for Holmes, a statement in verse like the one shared by the boot-​ lace seller is an example of the ways in which narratives created by Victorians with disabilities not only record the experiences of disabled people but also reveal how these experiences are shaped by the values of an able-​bodied majority. In her influential book-​length study of the cultural history of Victorian disability, Fictions of Affliction (2004), Holmes explores a wide range of self-​representations by people with disabilities in Victorian culture, from street patter to published memoirs. She concludes that nineteenth-​century disabled people’s “narratives of self were inevitably fashioned with reference to the melodramatic conventions that permeated cultural constructions of disability” (Fictions 133). 185

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White’s Blindness conforms closely to Holmes’ characterization of the self-​representation of people with disabilities in Victorian Britain. What attention to subscription, the mechanism of its publication, can add to Holmes’ analysis is an awareness of the importance of subscription to blind people who published autobiographical writing. Though the practice of publishing by subscription was not exclusive either to the nineteenth century or to authors with disabilities, the importance of this practice to people with disabilities is suggested by its use by White’s role model, blind poet Thomas Blacklock, who both published Poems by Mr. Thomas Blacklock with the help of more than 300 subscribers and dedicated the first seven pages of his book to listing their names (1–​7). A forerunner of contemporary crowdfunding, subscription was established as a practice in the seventeenth century. It developed to support the publication of books whose features, such as expensive illustrations, made them unusually costly to print. In order to limit the financial risk to printers, authors solicited prospective supporters to prepay for an as-​yet unpublished book or pamphlet. Typically, subscribers responded to a letter from the author or to a personal visit during which an author shared his or her plan for a book and also, in some cases, an outline or sample of their writing. Subscribers could be approached by the author directly or by a friend acting on his or her behalf. A subscriber’s financial support secured her or him a copy of the book or pamphlet once published. Support was also rewarded with the circulation of a subscriber’s name –​initially on a handwritten list circulated to prospective subscribers and later on a finalized version of that list, printed and bound in the book. These lists typically include subscribers’ addresses and the number of copies of the publication they had ordered. Press coverage of this practice suggests that, in the Victorian era, subscribing for the publication of a book was understood as a charitable act and, as with other forms of solicitation for charity, this practice was viewed suspiciously if not critically by some observers. To return to Mayhew, the fourth volume of Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1862, includes an account of a Mr. Driver, a person who solicits subscriptions for literary works he fails to publish. Driver has, the author of the account proposes, “lived upon this as yet unpublished song, and that unfinished political novel, for ten years or more” (Mayhew 409). The author explains how Driver approached him to subscribe for the publication of a song dedicated to Queen Victoria, soon to be published, without realizing his target had already “subscribed for this very song eight years previously” (409). Mr. Driver promises prompt publication but the skeptical subscriber predicts the promised song “will yet be in the womb of the press when the crack of doom comes” (410). Driver, it should be noted, is not identified by his critic as a disabled person, only as an unsuccessful author who exploits the goodwill and trust of others. The willingness of subscribers to invest in a project was presumably shaped by their own interests as well as their assessment of the soliciting author. Perhaps some subscribers were genuinely interested in a proposed book; perhaps some were motivated by the prospect of seeing their own name in print in association with a project that signaled their altruism. Some commentators admit they subscribed to a book simply to put an end to a needy author’s dogged solicitation. The anonymous author of “On Beggars,” quoted above, takes a broad and very negative survey of contemporary begging practices. Though he states his particular dislike for “travelling suitors for subscribers to books,” describing them as “most troublesome” (295), he admits to paying a subscription of “seven and sixpence” (295) to a persistent author for a book on statistics he has no plans to read. While the association of a book’s publication with charitable giving was precisely what made the practice of publishing by subscription unpalatable to authors who wished to be perceived as capable participants in a competitive literary marketplace, publication by subscription was an attractive option for literate people who, through disability, illness, or other circumstances, 186

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experienced poverty. This method of publication was, after all, a more socially respectable and lucrative undertaking than street begging. Part of the appeal of the practice, both for authors and subscribers, was that additional copies, beyond those promised to subscribers, could be printed and sold by authors or their friends, sometimes through social networks but often door-​to-​door. Disabled authors who published their books by subscription exchanged the story of their disability for financial support in ways that closely parallel but are distinct from begging. White both begins Blindness by addressing “the Subscribers” (vii) and closes his book with a list of their names. As White explains in his poems and their prefaces, he turned to poetry out of financial desperation, opting to publish books of poetry instead of begging in the street. Like street beggars, however, White shares the story of the origin of his blindness, characterizes blindness as a tragedy and very directly solicits both the sympathy and the charitable support of sighted people. Emphasizing the role played by financial need in his choice to become a writer, White insists on his lack of literary ambition, sharing with his readers the financial, rather than creative, impetus for his poem. In the first sentence of his Introduction, he explains: “I have been actuated by no mere love of literary fame in placing the composition before [readers]” (vii). Though this could be read as a standard expression of authorial modesty,White goes on to state directly that what he seeks, in writing and publishing this poem, is an income, his goal being to write poetry that can “assist in providing the common necessaries of life for a young and numerous family” (viii).White notes both his own family’s difficult circumstances and those of a larger community of working-​class people similarly impoverished by blindness and their related exclusion from paid work. He hopes that his poem will “attract the attention of the benevolent to the forlorn and destitute condition of many thousands of my poor afflicted brethren” (viii). White’s decision to publish by subscription follows failure in another, arguably related, genre. White explains in Blindness that, early in his life as a blind person, he wrote to his former employers at the Great Western Railway Company to request financial help. According to White, they answered his letter with what they deliberately termed “a donation” (110) of ten pounds, a word choice signaling their belief that they were not obliged to compensate White for his blindness or his loss of employment. In their reply, they offered a second gift of the same amount contingent on White agreeing to never approach the Company again with a request for financial aid. Disappointed and offended, White refused, preferring to publicize the Company’s uncharitable response. White also discusses in his poem a letter from an aristocratic woman who declined a request from him for aid. White had, in his time as a railway worker, assisted an upper-​class passenger, Lord John Russell, rescuing him from a fate similar to that of Ellis. White wrote to Lady Russell, reminding her of his service to “Lord John” (107) and sharing news of his blindness and unemployment. She declined to assist him, explaining she already had too many charitable commitments, a rejection of his request that White quotes in Blindness (108). White’s decision to both name an upper-​class woman who refused him aid and publicize her lack of generosity is a striking measure of the depth of his financial need and frustration. In accounts of his failure to secure support from Lady Russell and the Railway Company, White identifies himself as an unsuccessful author of begging letters, a genre of letter viewed unsympathetically, if not suspiciously, by many of White’s contemporaries. Begging letters, addressed to people who may or may not be personally known to the author, appealed for money or for other forms of support, such as employment or help with a particular need, for instance, the purchase of clothing required to begin a new job. These letters typically detail the suffering of the author, outlining the injuries, illnesses or other hardships that pushed the author into poverty. Widespread resentment of these letters and suspicion regarding the claims their writers made is suggested by the creation in 1869 of the Charity Organisation Society, a group dedicated to investigating the truth of claims made by begging-​letter writers (Mowat). Negative 187

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perspectives on these letters are articulated by Charles Dickens in his Household Words essay “The Begging-​Letter Writer” (1850), in which he goes so far as to call authors of these letters “scum of the earth” (172). Given the existence of views like these one, it is perhaps not surprising that White fails as a begging-​letter writer. Significantly, White’s discussion of his poverty and the origin story of his disability link his poem very closely with the begging-​letter genre. Indeed, the poem can be read as a kind of open begging letter in verse, one written and published for general circulation. White’s Blindness suggests that publication by subscription, though viewed suspiciously by a literary mainstream, was a valued means of support for working-​class disabled people with limited options. Whereas White failed to secure aid by writing begging letters, he was able to secure the support of more than 100 subscribers to Blindness, a number of whom subscribed for multiple copies. White would go on to use the same method to publish at least one other long poem, The Genius of the Blind, in that case with the help of 184 subscribers, a good number of whom who had subscribed for his earlier poem. Though poetry published by subscription allowed White to earn a subsistence income without begging in the streets, it is worth noting that both the solicitation of subscriptions and his use of verse to share the story of his disability connect his work with the work of street beggars who earned a living by sharing accounts of their disability in public spaces to solicit spare change.

The blind poet The celebrated Renaissance poet John Milton was for White, as he was for many blind people in the nineteenth century, an influential model of blind people’s creative potential and achievement. Finding in the literary record evidence of the special poetic achievement of blind authors, White also finds inspiration to represent his own blindness and to endure criticism for doing so: Orpheus like, I would in mournful strain, Pour forth a Blind Man’s sorrows, nor complain If, like the spirit that inspires my muse, I meet neglect, contempt, aye, and abuse. The Blind Man’s sorrows: he who would portray The Blind Man’s sorrows, in a mournful lay, Must like great Milton, or the Blind Greek Sage, Illustrious Homer, with the foe engage. (2) Here, White shares his perception of the blind poet as uniquely gifted but also as likely to be dismissed by a representative critic, a “foe,” for writing about the experience of blindness, an experience defined for White by “sorrows.” Though White names and eulogizes other real or imagined blind authors of epic poems, including, predictably, Homer and Ossian, Milton is his principal exemplar of a poetically gifted blind person. Milton’s name and the fact of his blindness feature in the first line of the first canto of Blindness, where White recalls how “Milton in the awful gloom /​Of darkness, deep, impervious as the tomb, /​With mental eyes, surveyed the aerial height, /​Whereon belligerent Angels armed to fight” (1). Replacing images of darkness with images of illumination, the second stanza of the poem shares White’s hope that “a gleam of Milton’s classic fire” (2) will inspire his poem “with radiant thought” (2).White also signals his admiration for Milton through his selection of poetic devices. While White’s poem is written in heroic couplets, not in blank verse, and is divided into cantos, rather than books, White makes frequent use of both epic similes and invocations. 188

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Milton’s influence on White informs both the style and the content of Blindness. White’s accounts of the death of Ellis, of the hardships of blindness and of the poverty of working-​class blind people coexist with long passages in which White narrates the fall of Adam and Eve. Identifying himself as the muse’s “blind votary,”White depicts Eve’s creation and explores “[t]‌he hapless fate” that befell Adam, who White described as “luckless” (10). The poem’s defining feature is arguably its oscillation between, on the one hand, the retelling of White’s personal narrative of disability, and, on the other, the story of Eden. Transitions between the two modes of White’s poem, the personal and the epic, are exemplified in the second canto when, after exploring at length his feelings of social isolation, White announces, mid-​stanza, a return to Adam’s story: …I am blind, and then I am deserted by my fellow men; Cast off or doom’d to be laid on the shelf, Like threadbare garment, or like hoarded pelf, That some rich miser, in his lust for gold, Hides in some snug retreat; and when grown old Brought forth perchance to be recast, or flung, Like filthy carrion or like rotten dung Into some hole or corner call’d a grave; Such were my fate, but that such fate I brave. But to return to Adam, who, at rest, Dream’d of wild rapturous joys; while from his breast, Jehovah took a rib, made Eve his bride, And laid her, calmly sleeping, by his side. (20) While this and similar transitions may feel abrupt, the poem is characterized by a tonal continuity,White’s mournful reflections on his blindness complementing his equally elegiac account of the loss of Eden.The fact that his story –​of involvement in a fatal accident, of disability and of poverty –​is told alongside the biblical narrative, wedged between epic content, arguably tells the reader as much about White as his direct reflections on his life, the very act of combining seemingly incongruent material revealing the complexity of his social position as a newly disabled person who is well educated but unemployed. While both White’s acquired blindness and his decision to tell the story of Adam and Eve in conjunction with his personal story of disability very clearly connect his project with Milton’s, other points of connection exist. Gesturing toward a biographical, rather than thematic or formal, connection between himself and Milton, White laments the difficulty of dictating Blindness. Though he does not name Milton in this account of his writing process, White evokes Milton’s dependence on two of his three daughters to act as amanuenses, a feature of both written and visual depictions of Milton’s blindness in circulation in White’s lifetime: …afflicted with total blindness, and not having the pecuniary means of employing a competent amanuensis, I was under the necessity of availing myself of such assistance as Providence had placed within my reach. The composition of this little volume has therefore been to me a long, tedious, and protracted undertaking, having to instruct the writer, one of my daughters, who is only eleven years of age, how to spell almost every word as I dictated it, when it was afterwards corrected and copied by another of 189

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my daughters, thirteen years of age, in those hours that should have been devoted to rest, after the tedium of a long day’s occupation. (ix) White’s frustration with his dependence on his children to serve as amanuenses was, it seems, increased by his financial dependence on a child who worked long hours to support the family financially. Though connected to Milton by his dictation to his daughters, White’s reference to his older daughter’s workday makes clear that his life circumstances differ in important ways from those of his role model. Motivated by admiration for Milton, but also by financial distress, White’s most notable references to Milton might well be his use of Milton’s name in a proposal White introduces in the opening pages of his book and elaborates in the poem proper. Proposing a solution to the problem of blind people’s poverty, White recommends the creation of a new charity to support working-​class blind people, a charity that will, he hopes, “last, like Milton’s immortal work, ‘Paradise Lost,’ throughout all time” and which, he argues, should be named after the poet the “Royal Miltonian Institution for the relief of the blind” (116). White worries his proposal “may appear strange and startling” (xix) or even that it will seem “at first sight, a wild visionary and Utopian scheme, emanating from the brains of a maniac” (xvii). It is, without question, an ambitious plan which calls for the creation of a national institution, headed by a leading philanthropist who would, in cooperation with Queen Victoria and the leaders of the Church, institute an annual sermon for blind people. This institution would gather and distribute funds raised by the sermon, which would be delivered in all churches in Britain on a designated Sunday every year. Significantly, in the poem, White has the figure of Britannia, moved by the suffering of Britain’s population of blind people, voice this proposal. White portrays Britannia speaking at a council gathered to hear the plan where, “with a cheek as pale /​And death-​like as a spectre, [she] did bewail, /​In tones of melting tenderness, /​The fate of hapless mortals blind and desolate” (89). White adds in an explanatory note that this initiative would benefit both unemployed blind people and the communities in which they live as “our streets [will] no longer be disgraced by the unseemly sight of poor helpless men or women led by dogs, begging their bread” (xix). When White, a railway worker turned poet, proposes a new charity to be named after John Milton as a solution to both his own poverty and the social problem of blind people’s begging, he demonstrates the complexity of his attitudes toward visual disability. An admirer of blind poets, White, a newly blind person, is deeply troubled by the exclusion of blind people from paid work; he is also troubled by the public presence of blind beggars. Appealing to the patriotism of his readers, White regrets that England is a country where “our towns and cities [are] all dispread /​With poor blind mendicants, whose daily bread, /​The dole of charity at times supplies; /​At others, all unheeded are their sighs” (86). Having introduced the problem of the blind beggar in visual language, as the “unseemly sight of poor helpless men or women,” White wonders: “shall the blind man by a dog be led, /​For ever through our streets to beg his bread” (87). Importantly,White contextualizes this portrait of begging with an examination of the limited charitable support available to blind people. He praises a few charitable groups but harshly criticizes others for poor financial management and for overly strict or narrow eligibility criteria. For example, White shares excerpts from the annual report for 1854 of the Indigent Blind Visiting Society, a London-​based organization whose budget he scrutinizes in order to show that the organization has “frittered away” (xii) three quarters of its annual budget, this at a time when more than 4,000 blind people were, White estimates, living in desperate circumstances in London. He contrasts the failure of the Indigent Blind Visiting Society with the success of 190

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another institution, a small but “very excellent and noble one” (xiii), which teaches blind people to read, also in London.White also praises the Blind Man’s Friend Society, a posthumous legacy of Charles Day, a gentleman moved to make his bequest by his own experience of acquired blindness.White, though appreciative of the work of this Society, which provided small pensions to blind people, quotes a letter from its treasurer in which he explains that there are 2,500 blind people who the Society considers deserving but cannot afford to assist. White’s incorporation into his book of both an annual report and the letter of a treasurer can be read as something that might be usefully thought of as activist accounting. More than a measure of the eccentricity of his project, White’s detailed discussion of charitable organizations’ failure to provide for an impoverished blind population is a persuasive engagement with the reality of blind people’s poverty. What I  wish to emphasize in closing this chapter is that both the content of White’s Blindness and the publication of this poem by subscription embody White’s double identity as beggar and poet. In Blindness, White shared an unconventional story of vision loss with his subscribers but he did so using negative language about blindness that, while it may have accurately reflected White’s experience and values, was wholly consistent with widely held social beliefs about blindness. White’s poem is, not unlike the larger discourse on blindness in the period, shaped by beliefs about compensation, both belief in blind people’s non-​ monetary compensation with the gift of literary inspiration and belief in society’s moral obligation to provide financial support to people with acquired blindness. Reflecting White’s aspirational identification with the blind poet and his real life position as blind beggar, White’s poem is part Miltonic epic, part begging letter and part beggar’s placard. Its mix of topics, genres and poetic conventions demonstrates White’s complicated perception of his own disability as a condition characterized by both poetic inspiration and poverty. While the blind poet embodies the myth of the compensatory gift, with sensory loss compensated by poetic inspiration and literary talent, the blind beggar, shut out from paid employment, is obliged to appeal for charity. It is in this sense that White’s Blindness is a record not only of the cultural significance of the blind poet and the blind beggar but also of the real-​world proximity of these two identities.

Works cited Blacklock, Thomas. Poems by Mr.Thomas Blacklock. 2nd ed. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1756. Carpenter, Mary Wilson. “Blinding the Hero.” Differences, vol.17, no.3, 2006, pp.52–​68. Dickens, Charles. “The Begging-​Letter Writer.” Household Words, no.8, May 18, 1850, pp.169–​72. Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. —​—​—​. “Working (with) the Rhetoric of Affliction:  Autobiographical Narratives of Victorians with Physical Disabilities” in Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, ed. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-​Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. Klages, Mary. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Mayhew, Henry with Bracebridge Hemyng, John Binny and Andrew Halliday. London Labour and the London Poor, vol 4. Charles Griffin and Company, 1861. Mowat, Charles Loch. The Charity Organisation Society; 1869–​1913: Its Ideas and Work. Methuen, 1961. “On Beggars.” London Journal, vol.72, no.3, July 11, 1846, pp.294–​5. Rodas, Julia Miele. “Misappropriations:  Hugh Stuart Boyd and the Blindness of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Victorian Review, vol.33, no.1, 2007, pp.103–​18. Symons, Arthur. “The Blind Beggar.” Poems.Vol 1. William Heinemann, 1912, p.36. Tilley, Heather. Blindness and Writing:  From Wordsworth to Gissing. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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Vanessa Warne Warne, Vanessa. Nineteenth-​Century Disability:  Cultures & Contexts, Annotation of Symons, Arthur, “The Blind Beggar,” www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/​items/​show/​12. —​—​—​. Nineteenth-​ Century Disability:  Cultures & Contexts, Annotation of Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/​items/​show/​11. —​—​—​. “Blindness: Creating and Consuming a Nonvisual Culture,” in A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Joyce Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp.79–​94. White, Edmund. Blindness: A Discursive Poem in Five Cantos. James Martin, 1856. —​—​—​. The Genius of the Blind: A Poem in Five Cantos. James Martin, 1859. Wordsworth,William. The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959.

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16 DEAFNESS AND MODERNISM Rebecca Sanchez

One of the most exciting recent developments in literary disability studies has been the movement to consider how nonnormative embodiment, intellectual and psychiatric ways of being can operate not only as objects of study but as methodologies, as epistemologies that shape our encounters with cultural texts regardless of the presence of a clear and obvious link to disability. The idea of disability’s broad relevance to the ways we engage with literature is not itself new. To focus on deafness in particular, in his 1995 Enforcing Normalcy, Lennard Davis explores the idea of “deafness as a critical modality” (100), and in Writing Deafness (2007), Christopher Krentz argues that “the hearing line resides behind every speech act, every moment of silence, every gesture, and every form of human communication, whether physical deafness is present or not” (5). Despite these vital interventions, however, in practice the vast majority of people working at the intersection of deafness and literary studies have continued to draw on texts that feature deaf characters, explicitly reference deafness, or are written by deaf authors.1 And this is true of analyses of disability more broadly. To be clear, such scholarship is vital in demonstrating the ways that disability, far from being peripheral to the literary canon, has in fact suffused it. Much more analysis in this vein is required to continue to recover the work of disabled artists and to unpack the ways cultural representations of disability have shaped both people’s understanding of disability off the page and our various literary traditions. Maren Linett’s Bodies of Modernism (2016), for example, argues for the importance of analyzing representation in modernist texts because of how such “depiction affects the overall workings of the text and what it tells us about how embodiment was understood in particular times and places” (5). Modernist representations of deafness in particular, she notes, “demonstrate larger attitudes about speech, communication, subjectivity and means of accessing knowledge” (86). As I argue in Deafening Modernism (2015), however, the focus on representation as the primary (or only) demonstration of the significance of disability studies in the humanities has had the unfortunate consequence of perpetuating the belief that discussions of disability are not relevant to those without a direct link to disability, a misconception that has too often resulted in the siloing of literary disability studies. Moreover, analysis of representation often falls into the trap of positioning disabled people as objects of analysis in ways that do not always fully account for disability perspectives. As Julie Avril Minich, Jina B. Kim, and Sami Schalk highlight in a 2017 exchange in Lateral, the critical methodologies we use have social justice implications. 193

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Pondering how to address the precarity of disabled lives at a moment of flourishing for the field of disability studies, Minich argues that we “recommit the field to its origins in social justice work” precisely by approaching disability not as subject or object of study but rather as active practice grounded in the worldings of disabled people. Or, as Kim puts it, “shifting disability from noun –​an identity one can occupy –​to verb: a critical methodology.” Such a “verbing” would both foreground the epistemologies of disabled people and emphasize the intersectionality of disability experience by moving focus away from how disability is defined and toward the myriad ways in which it is done. It would also implicate pedagogical practices around accessibility which have not always been registered as inextricably bound to theorization of disability in the ways they might be. Critical deafness, or deafness as (self-​reflexive) methodology, that is, can operate not only to complicate and nuance our understandings of the particular text or period being studied, but also to actively intervene in the cultural and political conversations for which deaf insight is vital (if unrecognized), to ensure that deaf people are perceived not as objects of study upon which hearing people can enact their education but as central to discourses that engage with deafness. Deafening conversations and texts in this way also expands our understanding of the meanings of deafness itself and engages broader communities in political struggles around language access, education, and identity facing deaf people. We might, for instance, consider how concepts of deaf space and architecture, which facilitate communication by maximizing the potential for eye lines through light design, transparent materials, and open floor plans, inform conversations in other contexts about how individuals relate to the built environment. Or we could think about deaf forms of relationship  –​the ways deaf people interact with one another when signing or with interpreters, for instance –​ in conversations about characters might more ethically or meaningfully interact. Literacy in languages that do not exist as spoken or written modalities could similarly expand conversations about what reading is and how language acquisition occurs. Because there is often a failure to recognize disability generally or deafness in particular as anything other than deficit, however, these cripistemologies are often neglected in theorizations of space, place, temporality, communication, embodiment, and the myriad other contexts in which such insight is relevant. And that lack of imagination also limits the ways we conceptualize deafness itself. Analyzing the relationship between deafness and modernism, then, needs to not only be about the recovery of work by deaf authors and analysis of deaf characters or language explicitly pertaining to deafness, but also a project of analyzing the ways in which deaf history, culture, and language use are always relevant to experimental modernist praxis, even and especially when no literal deafness is present in a text. And more than gesturing toward such connections, we need to provide concrete examples of what such readings might entail. With that in mind, this chapter will consider the relationship between modernist experimentation with the linguistic image and the model of interpenetrative animacy offered by the realization of such images in ASL (American Sign Language). In particular, drawing on an understanding of deafness as relationality that I  will argue emerges through the deployment of anthropomorphism in ASL poetics, I will demonstrate how deafening modernist poetry in this methodological sense enables us to register links between linguistic images and the ecopoetics explored in Marianne Moore’s 1924 long poem “An Octopus.” Given modernism’s engagement with questions and practices of indeterminacy, embodiment, translation, and trace, it is an especially rich context in which to engage in critical deafening. While modernist representations of disability generally and deafness specifically tended to be overwhelmingly negative, with deafness standing in for “…metaphysical loneliness and epistemological failure” (Linett 86) in the works of writers like Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, 194

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and Carson McCullers, modernist texts have much to tell us about communicative norms and methods of resisting them. Disability studies broadly challenges our assumptions about physical, intellectual, and psychiatric norms; a focus on deafness puts particular pressure on the assumptions we make about language: what constitutes language, what can or should the body look like while engaging in linguistic activity, whose communicative practice count as linguistic (and, by extension, who is counted and who is not). These questions are of particular relevance for considerations of aesthetic experimentation in the early twentieth century at the intersection of bodies, images, and language, experiments that were undertaken against a backdrop of increasingly fervent calls for linguistic conformity that would ultimately shape both twentieth-​ century deaf lives and experimental modernist praxis. United States language politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century revolved around the construction of both the myth of the existence of a “purer” American English in the past that needed to be preserved against a rapidly shifting linguistic environment and, given the lack of such an actual unified language, the invention of one in the present. The land occupied by the United States has always been home to a great deal of linguistic diversity, both in the range of languages used and in the myriad ways in which English, since its arrival, has been deployed. For a time, that diversity was recognized as a distinct quality of the nation. Politicians recruited new immigrants by publicizing the country in foreign languages.2 Citizenship was not dependent on the mastery, or even necessarily the usage, of English. In fact, heterogeneous language practices were directly linked with the United States’ form of democratic government. As Alexis de Tocuqueville muses in Democracy in America (2003), “The constant restlessness at the center of a democracy leads…to endless developments in the language…” (554). In the years leading into the modernist period, however, attitudes toward language shifted dramatically. After the American Civil War, many came to perceive linguistic difference as a dangerous reminder that “Americans” did not share a singular culture, history, or racial or ethnic identity. This diversity was underlined as increases in immigration and in overseas imperialism, the latter after the Spanish American War of 1898, continued to alter the demographics of the nation. Unlike skin color or heritage, language, it was believed, could be modified, and efforts were therefore made to codify a unified American identity around a standardized “American” English. In conjunction with the rise of eugenic philosophy and a widespread nativism and xenophobia, those who used languages other than English or who used English in nonnormative ways found themselves increasingly under attack. In 1907 Theodore Roosevelt declared, “We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house” (8).To be American in the early twentieth century, that is, one had to have fluency in English. The link between the two was put into law by the Naturalization Act of 1906, the first law to establish English-​language literacy as a requirement for citizenship.As Joshua Miller has noted, these issues were exacerbated by the United States’ entry into the First World War, which set off new waves of xenophobia as well as a renewed desire for a recognizably American identity. In that context, Miller explains, language “became understood as a surrogate for race and class differences.Those who could not or chose not to speak English or who spoke it in unfamiliar accents came to be viewed as unpatriotic and potentially subversive threats to national unity” (36). The stakes of linguistic compliance, that is, were high. And this had particularly dangerous implications for American’s two indigenous non-​English speaking populations: Native Americans and the deaf, both of which were targeted for reeducation through residential boarding school systems that enabled a greater level of biopolitical control than was possible with other groups. For deaf people, this push for standardized language usage occurred 195

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at the same moment that the development of new technologies of sound recording like the phonautograph were creating opportunities for different kinds of articulation training.3 Excited by the prospect that the deaf could be “ma[de] [to] hear,” in the words of Alexander Graham Bell, oralists –​those who believed that deaf people should be taught to speak and speechread and forbidden to sign  –​took over deaf schools across the country, firing deaf teachers and shifting curriculums to focus exclusively on the acquisition of normative speech (Bell). This zeitgeist was bolstered by the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf held in 1880 in Milan, which had determined that signed languages were damaging to deaf people and should be banned from deaf schools. Children who failed to comply were often physically punished, a trend that continued across the twentieth century. “Whenever teachers and dorm counselors saw that I was signing, they would whack me on the hand with a ruler. I was 4 ½,” one former boarding school resident recalled in an interview in 2008. “Can you imagine smacking such a tiny hand?” Another former student recalled how the principal “came up to me and mouthed the words ‘you signed.’ I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Give me your hand!’ I put out my hand, and she smacked me several times. She repeated, ‘You signed’ and kept on whacking my hand” (Audism Unveiled). Failure to abandon one’s native language in the context of these boarding schools was a transgression severe enough to be met with corporal punishment. This illustration of how far English language nativists were willing to go to impose a standardized English is vital for understanding the climate in which modernist writers engaged with English in nonnormative ways in their creative work. At the same moment that nativists sought to produce and enforce a “unified” American English that would align with the United States’ new status as a global power, modernists were using linguistic experimentation to highlight the pluralism of languages and forms of language used by people within the United States through techniques ranging from incorporating vernacular forms of speech to fragmentation to bricolage. Such work rejected the idea forwarded by H.L. Mencken that “The character chiefly noted in American speech by all who have discussed it, are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country…[T]‌here is practically no difference between the American spoken in our 4,039,000 square miles of territory, except as spoken by foreigners” (28) as well as the notion that a uniform American language functioned as an indicator of the national strength. Signed languages, which foreground not only linguistic diversity but also the very nonnormative bodyminds that were rendered invisible by claims like Mencken’s, similarly highlight the meaningful absences of such accounts. Beyond these broad contextual links, the existence of signed languages at the intersection of language, bodies, and images also enable us to engage more specifically with modernist preoccupation with the ontology of the linguistic image and the relation such images suggest between words and things. Ezra Pound attempted to codify this relationship in his famous call for “direct treatment of the thing” (3) that was to be “free from [the] emotional slither” (12) he associated with nineteenth-​century verse. “It will be as much like granite as it can be” (12), Pound said of this new, more direct, imagistic poetry, fixating on H.D.’s image in “Hermes of the Ways” of the “hard sand break[ing]/​…the grains of it…/​…clear as wine” (37) as an example of such writing. Pound envisioned a meeting of words and things through language that was presentational. “Don’t be descriptive,” he insisted, praising Shakespeare’s image of “Dawn in russet mantle clad” for “present[ing] something which the painter does not present.There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents” (6). Imagism as a movement, and particularly Pound’s engagement with it, was notoriously short-​lived. But I revisit his articulation of this understanding of the visual image both because his specific ideas about what happens in the space where the visual meets the semantic interestingly intersect with aspects of actual 196

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visual languages and because the underlying assumption that such a question was valuable had a significant afterlife, appearing reimagined in the work of writers across the twentieth century.4 It is important to point out in any conversation of ASL and images that signed languages are not iconographic. As in other languages, words are comprised of smaller abstract units (ASL has five: handshape, movement, palm orientation, location, and nonmanual signifiers like facial expression). Nevertheless, signed languages have different relationships to both images and signifieds than do spoken and written ones.Words in ASL are tangible.They can be manipulated, moved through space and time, captured and reshaped. While signs do not (re)produce the real, the signified they reference, they do produce a real, a material sign-​thing in spacetime. And this has implications for how the relationship between humans and nonhuman entities is conceptualized. There exists in signed languages a foundational interpenetration between humans, words, and their referents that links conversations about animacy to the ontology of the linguistic image. In the first chapter of The Heart of the Hydrogen Jukebox (2009), Miriam Lerner’s documentary on the development of ASL poetry in the 1980s in Rochester, a series of ASL poems illustrate these dynamics. The unattributed works are translations of images of natural scenes that appear behind the signer. The first features trees whose leaves have changed to orange and yellow in the autumn along a lake that plunges into a series of waterfalls that occupy the foreground of the image. The signer begins by placing the “old yellow red trees,” their shape on the land, the way their leaves rustle in the breeze, before establishing the lake in front of them which ripples gently in the signer’s hands before spilling over into a series of gently plashing waterfalls.5 Not only is the falling water active, but so is each element of the environment, all of which are interconnected, bleeding into and through one another. The scene comes alive. Or, rather, its translation into ASL foregrounds its always already existing animation. Similarly in the next translation of an image of sun beams breaking through pine trees in a forest, the signer begins by establishing the rustling grass on the forest floor before setting up the trees, each bursting into life as though it were newly sprouted from the ground, its leaves and needles established with flickering hands that resemble impressionist brushstrokes. The sun beams push through the dense forest, through branches and around trunks, actively interpenetrating the scene before landing on the forest floor. Again, each element of the scene is active, engaged, animate. Nothing is still in this still life; it is all in the process of happening in what Gertrude Stein describes in “Composition as Explanation” as a “continuous present” that, unlike repetition or “beginning again and again” produces an immediacy and vitality in writing (524). That vitality is a critical part of what ASL adds to our understanding of how language interacts with the visual. Signed languages have the capacity to translate not only words but images, which can be presented rather than described. And that presentation highlights the activeness of the image as well as its interpenetration with the human, the interaction of beings across the animacy hierarchy. Animacy, Mel Chen explains, “has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, and liveliness” (2). “Language users,” she continues, make use of “animacy hierarchies to manipulate, affirm, and shift the ontologies that matter the world” (42). Signed languages have a unique relationship to linguistic animacy in that each word is animated in the hands of the signer. Beyond this basic fact of that movement, the inseparability of human and word bleeds into a blurring of elements within the scene. Each aspect of the environment the signer produces continues moving, sliding into the next. Rather than constituting a fixed backdrop for more animate humans or animals, the trees, water, grass, and light are constantly changing and moving into one another as well as the signer. That interpenetration is key. The signer is not set apart from the world around her or the linguistic images she calls into being. Clayton Valli’s “Deaf World” emphasizes this sense of 197

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connection thematically by positing technologically mediated sound as an imposition not only on a deaf child, but on the world itself. By contrast, the signer notes, the rocks, water, trees, mountains, clouds, and world itself are deaf, an association that flips ableist understandings of disability as abnormal or unnatural. Rather than experiencing a sense of connection with the human world of film and music, the signer identifies with the nonhuman. Here deafness is defined not as medicalized condition or social construction but rather as a form of relationality, specifically to the natural world, a form of interaction through which the poem’s signer finds sameness with the rock or the clouds. This identification provides an alternative means of understanding or evaluating animacy that is also explored in Valli’s poem “Hands.” “Hands” explores the implications of the fact that in signed languages things in environment –​trees, rain, the world itself –​are imaged through human hands. “What are hands?” the poem asks, answering the question with a series of natural images: rain falling, flowers blooming, wind blowing, leaves falling from trees, the world itself, and finally self-​expression. The “human” elements of that list, the hands and the expression of self, are not segregated from these other entities; the meaning of the hands and of that artistic expression are the ways in which the environment is embodied in them. Moreover, as in the image translations of Hydrogen Jukebox, each of these images are in motion; the signs themselves, and therefore their signifieds, are understood as fluid, changing, being (verbing). When we contemplate deafening as modality, deafness as a doing or praxis, these are some of the modes of interaction that emerge. As Chen notes, “the sentience of a noun phrase has linguistic and grammatical consequences, and these consequences are never merely grammatical and linguistic, but also deeply political” (55). And, we might add, ethical. Embedded within animacy hierarchies is information about the ways in which humans conceptualize their relationship to other living and nonliving entities. ASL and other signed languages enable linguistic expressions of those relationships that are structurally impossible in spoken and written language. And these linguistic embodiments, as Rachel Sutton-​Spence and Donna Jo Napoli note, “reveal a Deaf world view” (448) that “contribute[s]‌to the cohesion of Deaf communities” (443) by staging the interpenetration of the human and the nonhuman as a matter of everyday language use. This interpenetration also provides new ways of thinking about anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is frequently critiqued as a violent attempt to translate (and thereby fundamentally alter) the world around the human into a human frame of reference, an aspect that is not entirely absent from signed anthropomorphism. But there is a difference between using language to describe an anthropomorphic relationship (as, for instance, the image of a rock patiently waiting, in which the rock appears to be translated into human terms, its otherness domesticated) and enacting it, doing anthropomorphism so that the human signing the image must, for the duration of that linguistic performance, inhabit rock-​ness. As Sutton-​Spence and Napoli argue, whether presenting nonhuman animals with roughly similar bodily topologies, in which case the signer can map the subject’s body parts onto her own, or inanimate objects, which can be presented through the use of classifiers and/​or nonmanual signifiers, “anthropomorphism in sign languages demonstrates the extraordinary potential for storytellers and poets to present alternative worldviews through the direct transfer of person of nonhuman entities” (471).6 This extended sense of self is encapsulated in one of the BSL signs for empathy which, as Sutton-​Spence and Napoli note, is glossed as CHANGE-​PLACES-​WITH (451). To linguistically embody a nonhuman entity is to occupy their perspective, to position oneself within their frame of reference. That experience of deafening, of enacting the subject position of entities along the animacy hierarchy, functions to decenter the human or, more particularly, given the ways that anthropomorphized characters in deaf stories and poetry overwhelmingly tend to 198

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be presented as deaf (while human characters are more likely to be portrayed as hearing), they create possibilities for forms of identification across species and animacy lines. That radical decentering of the human, specifically by understanding humanness in relation to the animate and inanimate environment, is key to Marianne Moore’s ecopoetics in “An Octopus,” and helps us link the poem’s consideration of interdependence with its use of images. The text opens with an image of interpenetrative relationality that characterizes the poem’s approach to the environment: “An Octopus //​of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat” (1). Rather than using anthropomorphism to center human experience, the mountain is imagined as an octopus; specifically the octopus flattening itself as it hides on the sea floor. In the next few lines, the ice is also presented “killing prey with the concentric crushing rigour of the python” (9) and “hover[ing] forward ‘spider fashion’ ” (10). In addition to linking the mountain to animals, these descriptions emphasize movement. “An Octopus //​of ice” gives us the mountain both as teeming ecosystem and as ice and rock that are constantly shifting, the glacier advancing and retreating (in part, not incidentally, as a result of anthropogenic climate change). The image of glacier as octopus does more than present a jarring imaginative rendering of Mt. Rainier; it also deconstructs a false perception of mountains as fixed and unmoving. The ice does shift. The various living and un-​living organisms that inhabit Mt. Rainier are constantly in motion. And the rock itself, composed of andesite lava flows, functions as a record of former explosive activity. Understanding movement and ecological interpenetration as bound up in the visual image enables us to register the implications of Moore’s opening lines. The poem circles around this question of how humans relate (or should relate) to “the diversity of creatures” (75) (human and nonhuman) who inhabit the mountain, to the mountain itself, and the role language plays in the structuring of those relationships. Pondering the word “tree,” the poetic speaker questions whether it is an appropriate …word for these things “flat on the ground like vines” some “bent in a half circle with branches on one side suggesting dust-​brushes, not trees, some finding strength in union, forming little stunted groves their flattened mats of branches shrunk in trying to escape” from the hard mountain “planed by ice and polished by the wind” (180–​186) What is missing from the spoken and written linguistic modalities to which Moore has access is the capacity to present change over time, the dynamic and interdependent existence of trees (though she can, and does, describe it). Because ASL has a different relationship to space, time, and movement than English does, the sign “tree” can convey this particular scenario. Through classifiers ASL trees can lay on the ground, or have branches on just one side, or be positioned in groups. Moreover the ways in which ASL expresses that dynamism are implicated in the interpenetration of trees with other aspects of the environment including humans that the poem describes. By enacting that relation, ASL conditions signers to think about the modes of interrelation with the natural world that “An Octopus” imagines. Within the poem that interrelation is positioned against more common linguistic approaches to nature and the misperceptions they perpetuate, specifically the rhetoric of the National Park Services brochure that the poem remixes. As Jennifer Ladino argues, Moore’s poem uses its bricolage of government rhetoric, quotation, personal observation, and poetic images to critique the “NPS’s anthropocentric approaches to nature and its manufacture of Mount Rainier as a commodifiable resource” (289).That composition praxis functions not only as an alternative 199

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to the didacticism of the brochure by “treat[ing] the NPS instructions as, first and foremost, ‘rewritable’ ” (298) but also to convey something structural about what a mountain is and how humans might relate to it. “An Octopus” demonstrates a way of thinking the interaction between language and the natural world that isn’t about naming, dominating, or domesticating (i.e. centering the human) but that instead highlights the structural parallels between the shifting, interpenetrative, indeterminate ecosystem of Mt. Rainier and the forms of language Moore deploys to express that. In that attempt to find in the composition of language something of the mountain (rather than shaping the mountain to not only existing vocabularies but existing arrangements), Moore’s poem reflects the ways that signed languages enact images. Unlike Pound’s ideal of unmoving granite, in ASL our mountains move, the sign for rock sliding into open hands thrown upward towards a mountain shape they cannot fully contain.The work of translating the poem’s title and opening line into ASL would be learning how to inhabit the similarity of shape and movement between mountain and octopus that it suggests, drawing together the sign for mountain and octopus, making glacial arms embodied in human fingers resemble tentacles. To exist in ASL is to consider, as part of both poetic but also quotidian engagement with language, what it means to dwell in and with these entities, to perceive them as interrelated with the self rather than separate. As Valli suggests in “Deaf Worlds,” deafness itself might be conceptualized as a form not (only) of physiology or identity but of relationality between the human and the nonhuman. It also reminds us of the link between such forms of boundary blurring interaction and the visual image. Such reflection calls our attention to the ways humans are present in the English version of the poem’s opening lines (“An Octopus //​of ice”) as well, as the observer who notices the relationship between the glacier and the octopus. Whether or not such a relation would ontologically exist in the absence of human observation (whether the resemblance is imposed by human perception or merely recognized by it), it is a human who records that in language. But this understanding of the human –​as recognizer of relationality –​moves away from ways in which the interaction between humans and the natural world have tended to be figured: as separate, something to be named, something over which humans have dominion. If deafness can be imagined as a series of modes of interaction with other subjects and with the world, humanity itself might be defined as a state of recognizing relation. Bonnie Costello has argued that “ultimately [“An Octopus”] is not a poem about Mt. Rainier…[it] is about nothing less than the earth and our institutional and imaginative relationship to it” (100). But as reading the poem in the context of ASL literature helps us recognize, these need not be conceptualized as separate things. The shifting, animate ecosystem that is Mt. Rainier offers a model of relationality that might also be productively engaged in terms of the ways humans both interact with nonhuman entities in their environment and the ways we figure those interactions in language. Describing Moore’s concept of humility in relation to her depiction of the natural world, Jennifer Leader argues for the importance (and need for further consideration) of the “notion of being as complex interplay between self and other…particularly evident when Moore begins to explore a relational connectivity amongst natural entities in her animal poetry” (329). As thinking about signed languages in relation to these concerns highlights, such complex interplay between self and other is the essence of ASL, and this fact has both ethical and ecological implications. Through its deployment of animorphism and the ways its movement through spacetime shifts our understanding of animacy, ASL demonstrates that language need not be in opposition to the kinds of interpenetrative ecopoetic relationality imagined in “An Octopus.” And in framing conversations about language in these terms, Moore’s poem opens up new 200

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spaces in which to theorize the particular linguistic strategies of ASL. By exploring some of the ways that deafening modernist experiments with the linguistic image complicates and enhances our understanding of both, it has been my hope to demonstrate the broad and pressing relevance of conversations about deaf cultures, poetics, and languages to contexts in which they have not traditionally been perceived as relevant.

Notes 1 It is common to indicate a distinction between physiological and cultural deafness with the use of a capital D in the case of the latter. This practice dates to a presentation given by James Woodward (then of Gallaudet University) in 1972 (published in 1978). As Woodward and Thomas Horejes explained in 2016, the terminology was never intended as a taxonomy; “People can be both ‘deaf ’ and ‘Deaf ’ at the same time (285).” James Woorward and Thomas Horejes, “deaf/​Deaf: Origins and Usage,” The Sage Deaf Studies Encyclopedia Eds. Genie Gertz and Patrick Boundreault (Los Angeles:  Sage Reference, 2016), pp. 284–​287. The distinction, they note, is also inadequate to attend to the intersectional identities of deaf people and the different significances attached to deafness in diverse cultural contexts. Since the 1970s, however, it has been used to create a binary division between different “kinds” of deaf people and to assign value to individuals perceived to occupy one or the other group. To avoid this problematic bifurcation, throughout the chapter, I will use the lower case. 2 See Bailey, Speaking American, 14. 3 For more on the connections between sound-​recording technology and deaf pedagogy, see Sterne, The Audible Past. 4 While this chapter focuses on ASL in relation to visual images, it is important to note that ASL is not always experienced as a visual modality. Signing deafblind individuals read Tactile ASL (TASL) in their hands and on their bodies. 5 Unless otherwise noted, translations of ASL texts are by author. 6 Classifiers are handshapes that can substitute for nouns and verbs in ASL to convey information about size, shape, movement, and relation to other subjects and objects in an environment.

Works cited Audism Unveiled. Prod. Benjamin Bahan, H-​Dirksen Bauman, and Facundo Montenegro. Dawn Sign, 2008. DVD. Bailey, Richard W. Speaking American: A History of English in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bell, Alexander Graham. Personal correspondence with Mary E. Bennett. August 30, 1913. www.loc.gov/​ resource/​magbell.16900133/​?sp=4&st=text. Chen, Mel. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Costello, Bonnie. Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995. H.D. “Hermes of the Ways.” H.D. Collected Poems 1912–​1944. Ed. Louis L. Martz. New  York:  New Directions. 1925, pp.37–​39. Lerner, Miriam (dir.). The Heart of the Hydrogen Jukebox. Rochester Institute of Technology. 2009. Kim, Jina B. “Toward a Crip-​of-​Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?’ ” Lateral 5.1 (2017). http://​csalateral.org/​issue/​6-​1/​forum-​alt-​humanities-​critical-​disability-​studies-​crip-​of-​color-​ critique-​kim/​. Krentz, Christopher. Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-​Century American Literature. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Ladino, Jennifer K. “Rewriting Nature Tourism in ‘An Age of Violence’: Tactical Collage in Marianne Moore’s ‘An Octopus.’” Twentieth Century Literature 51.3 (2005), pp. 285–​315. Leader, Jennifer. “ ‘Certain Axioms and Rivaling Scriptures’: Marianne Moore, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Ethics of Engagement.” Twentieth Century Literature vol.51. no.3 (2003), pp. 316–​340. Linett, Maren. Bodies of Modernism:  Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.

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Rebecca Sanchez Mencken, H.L. The American Language: An Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States (1919). West Valley City, Utah: The Editorium LLC, 2001. Miller, Joshua A. Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Minich, Julie Avril. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now.” Lateral vol.5, no.1, 2016. http://​ csalateral.org/​issue/​5-​1/​forum-​alt-​humanities-​critical-​disability-​studies-​now-​minich/​. Moore, Marianne. “An Octopus.” Complete Poems. New York: Penguin Books. 1967, pp. 71–​76. Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed.T.S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1918. Roosevelt, Theodor. Qtd. in James Crawford, At War with Diversity:US Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety. Clevedon, UK: Cromwell, 2000. Sanchez, Rebecca. Deafening Modernism:  Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Schalk, Sami. “Critical Disability Studies as Methodology.” Lateral vol.5, no.1 (2017). http://​csalateral.org/​ issue/​6-​1/​forum-​alt-​humanities-​critical-​disability-​studies-​methodology-​schalk/​. Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” Stein Writings 1903–​1932. New  York:  The Library of America, 1998. 520–​529. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past:  Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham:  Duke University Press, 2003. Sutton-​Spence, Rachel and Donna Jo Napoli. “Anthropomorphism in Sign Languages: A Look at Poetry and Storytelling with a Focus on British Sign Language.” Sign Language Studies, vol.10, no.4, 2010, pp.442–​475. de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. New York: Penguin, 2003. Valli, Clayton. “Deaf World.” ASL Poetry: Selected Works of Clayton Valli. San Diego: DawnSign Press, 1995. Valli, Clayton. “Hands.” ASL Poetry: Selected Works of Clayton Valli. San Diego: DawnSign Press, 1995.

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17 THE “FURY OF LOVING JOYFULLY” Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations Elizabeth Leake Amelia Rosselli (1930–​1996) To speak of the life of Italian poet Amelia Rosselli, it is conventional to begin with the death of her father, Carlo Rosselli. Co-​founder and principal theoretician of the Italian anti-​fascist resistance group Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom), he and his brother Nello were assassinated in 1937 on Mussolini’s orders. The practical and symbolic importance of their deaths –​over 150,000 people attended Carlo’s funeral –​must not be underestimated if we are to have any sense of Amelia Rosselli’s position as the daughter of Carlo Rosselli, one of the brightest stars in the firmament of Italian Resistance heroes and from whose legacy she is inseparable.1 Rosselli was the daughter of “the very incarnation of the Resistance” long before she was a poet (Pugliese 2). Later, her familial and literary identities merged when she became custodian of her father’s memory as the editor of his personal correspondence.2 The aim of this chapter is to elucidate the repercussions of critical readings of disability that resist its representation through a game of continual substitution. Where Rosselli writes about her disability, her critics invoke her family history; where Rosselli writes about poetry, the critics invoke her disability; and where the poet writes about history, the critic invokes her poetry. What does it mean that her critical readership plays a continuous shell game with a theme she consistently foregrounds throughout her opus? And what are the ramifications for disability studies when we consider mental illness as a disability? The reception of Rosselli’s poetry in the light of her mental illness and death exemplify the limitations of critical modalities that ground aesthetic representations of disability within the exclusive purview of the symbol. Rosselli’s case illustrates the risk of reading madness as metaphor, obviating the possibility of aesthetic analysis. After her father’s murder, Rosselli and her siblings were raised by her grandmother Amelia Pincherle Moravia Rosselli and her mother, Marion Cave. Of these two, it is Rosselli’s grandmother who looms largest, since Cave’s precarious health caused frequent absences from home. Pincherle Moravia Rosselli was a well-​known and prolific author.3 Likened to Cornelia the mother of the ancient Roman Gracchi brothers, whose self-​sacrifices for political reasons were born from the teachings of their mother,4 all three of her children died for political reasons: besides Carlo and Nello, her firstborn, Aldo, was killed in 1916 by the Austrians.5

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Pincherle Moravia Rosselli first attained fame as a playwright with her three-​act drama Anima (1898);6 it tells the story of a woman who reveals to her fiancé that she was raped as an adolescent, only to be abandoned by him on the grounds that she is unworthy of marriage. Anima argues for the existence of a kinship of souls between two people that is independent of their bodily histories: that is, for the irrelevance of the body to one’s “true” identity, locating the Subject (anima) entirely external to the body such that the soul (identity, subjectivity) is immune to bodily violence. She returned to that question in the short story Fratelli minori (Younger Brothers) in 1921, that is, five years after the battle-​field death of her firstborn son, Aldo. The story extends Anima’s debate about the aftermath of sexual violence to military violence, again privileging the soul over the body, but with a twist. Focusing on the wartime death of an eldest son and its repercussions for the younger brothers of the title, the same hierarchy (soul>body) is recast in exclusively political terms, and leads to the sacrifice of the younger brothers –​a point surely not lost on Carlo and Nello. Thus, Pincherle Moravia Rosselli’s works, like her granddaughter’s life, are similarly embroiled in the nexus of family, nation, and history inscribed upon the bodies of her subjects. Considering the circumstances of her father’s death, it is perhaps no surprise that much Rosselli scholarship emphasizes this aspect of her genealogy. Upon reaching adulthood, Rosselli moved on the fringe of an innovative poetic circle, the Gruppo ‘63. She gained a wide audience when selections of her poems were published in the prestigious journal Menabò with an introduction by Pier Paolo Pasolini. But it was after her suicide on the 33rd anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death that her work garnered real public attention. Specifically, critics replaced discussion of the remarkably innovative formal aspects of her poetry with references to her “suicide sisters,” including Antigone, Electra, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf. Of these, Sylvia Plath looms largest.7 Critics were quick to note that they share certain biographical details (both lost their fathers as young girls; both underwent electro-​shock therapy), and Rosselli was familiar with Plath’s life and works: she translated Plath; she frequently named Plath as one of the greatest American poets,8 and she argued for a close study of Plath’s poetry as a way to understand Plath’s suicide.9 These similarities, taken with the suicide date, mean that according to the canonical reading, Rosselli’s suicide was deliberately enacted on the anniversary of Plath’s as an act of identification and of commemoration. Thus, although there was no shortage of illustrious predecessors in Rosselli’s family, critics nevertheless pointed to a new matrilineal inheritance established at her death. After her suicide, she was not so much Carlo’s daughter as a second Lady Lazarus, following Plath’s eloquent mortuary poem about suicide attempts.10 Whether or not Rosselli intended to die on the anniversary of Plath’s death is of less importance to me than the intention attributed to the date and the two-​fold symbolic role it bestows upon Plath. First, Plath threatens to eclipse Carlo Rosselli’s position in her posthumous biography. And second, Plath reframes Rosselli’s relationship with her mother and grandmother. The identification of Plath as Rosselli’s antecedent reflects a substitution of the maternal bodies analogous to the substitution of her father as object of commemoration. But the apparent disavowal of Pincherle Moravia Rosselli and of Cave effectively enforces them as structuring absences. Thus, in addition to Plath’s posthumous female filiation, their displaced matrilineality is, paradoxically, bound up in a masculinist historicizing of her work, manifest in readings of Rosselli’s poetry as indelibly and exclusively shaped by the forces of history. Moreover, this historicizing serves the dual function of reinserting her into the Italian national narrative –​making her suicide into a tragic reminder of Italy’s glorious Resistance history –​and allowing the reader to avoid confronting what is most unsettling about her works, namely, the ways they communicate with Rosselli’s intermittent mental instability.This subsuming of madness under the mantle 204

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of history is nowhere more visible than in the Fascist-​era police files on her father held in the central state archives in Rome, where she is depicted in the family correspondence as both an illustrious Rosselli and a pathologized Cave. Rosselli’s official position in history, then, is bound up from birth with the question of her psychopathology. Its historicization –​her madness inscribed in the national archive –​means that rather than opposite ends of a spectrum, these two ends meet to form a loop: her historical position leads to madness, madness leads to the radical alterity of her poetry, and these in turn are reflected in her historical position. As Carlo’s daughter, she is all history, a pure product of Western Europe in the late 20th century, such that everything from her ability to write in three languages to her penchant for plosives and her confessional style are symptoms of the historical trauma visited upon her tragic generation.11 Read as Plath’s sister, critics evince a pathologizing concern with her aesthetics typical of critical interventions around disability and an example of Ato Quayson’s observation that “disability is an ‘excessive’ sign that invites interpretation” (14). Rosselli’s work is very open-​ handed about its inspirations, and discourses of biological, literary, and linguistic engenderment abound in her writings. But after her suicide, apart from Sylvia Plath, her writerly identity was understood to be nearly devoid of literary antecedents. Indeed, some of her most important critics considered her work to be insistent in its disavowal of any possible literary kinships.12 Although these two interpretive tendencies are often in conflict, their effect in the context of discussions of her suicide are similar: they reduce the motive of her death to a single, impersonal master narrative. In the case of an interpretive framework organized around Rosselli’s aesthetics of singularity, her death is of a piece with her status as an anomaly; and in the case of the historicizing reading, her mental illness and suicide are seen as collateral damage from the war. In contrast, if we read Rosselli beyond the historicist-​aesthetic continuum, what emerges is in fact a powerful poetic engagement with the twin traumas of violence and loss. In the pages that follow, I take a different tack, attempting to move beyond this critical short-​circuit to see what happens when we attend carefully to representations of the body and embodied experience (a reading facilitated by but not exclusive to the critical modalities typical of disability studies) –​ when disability, and the way it has been reduced to a form of shorthand in the critical emphasis on suicide, is not a “hermeneutical impasse” (Quayson 52). Of particular interest to me here will be the body as a source of sexual pleasure.

Variazioni belliche13 Elsewhere, I  examine Rosselli’s English-​ language poetry collection entitled Sleep (written 1953–​1966).14 In my reading, Sleep offers a poetic commentary on her critical reception, thereby establishing the poet not only as someone to be read but also reader of her readers. It is precisely this identification of poetic subject and object that has pathologized Rosselli’s writings (and the poet herself, by extension), stripping them bare of their genealogical roots and imposing a discourse of disease alongside that of irreducible alterity. This plays out in her criticism as the attribution to the poems of a kind of unnatural scientific phenomenology, of which Pasolini’s widely cited introduction of Amelia Rosselli’s poetry in Menabò is exemplary. Using terms such as “tumors” and “atomic explosions,” Pasolini depicts Rosselli’s poetry as something gone horribly wrong in the laboratory, an example of what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “narrative prosthesis” (20). The idea is that there is no narrative without the catalyst of disability, defined as excess, refusal to comply or conform, something or someone undisciplined to propel and structure the story (Mitchell and Snyder 16). Here we see that alongside a dependency on disability within narrative is an analogous dependency within critical discourse, such 205

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that the pathologized poet becomes a similarly unwieldy, noncompliant, nonnormative subject. It is precisely this discourse of non-​normativity that motivates the resultant critical narratives, which typically stress difference, deviance, and only potential recuperation or repair and, more relevantly, strip Rosselli of any agency as the enunciating subject. The canonical reading of another of Rosselli’s texts, the 1964 poetry collection Variazioni belliche or War Variations, illustrates the opposing tendency –​not to aestheticize but to historize, that is, to privilege the text’s mimetic referentiality: in other words, to see this as a book, as the title suggests, about war. It was her first published collection, and it is typically considered to be a lengthy meditation on the political legacy of her male kin –​grist for the historicizing mill. In contrast, I would like to argue that alongside the historically inflected reading, in which the variations are, precisely, on the theme of war, there is another possible reading, in which armed conflict gives way to conflicts of an economy of desire, in which aggression is productive, not destructive.The collection displays an increasing concern with sexuality, articulated through the double-​edged lexicon of the body either preparing for war, engaged in battle, or recovering from it. Variazioni belliche redirects what are conventionally perceived as outward, historical referents, so that the weapons to which her poetry refers are within her own body. Thus, this is, in a certain sense, an analogous move to the one I observed in Sleep –​the reappropriation of the gaze that takes place in that volume is, in Variazioni belliche, expressed as a reappropriation of the body. No longer an archival document, or a text that argues for the irrelevance of the body to one’s “true” identity, as in her grandmother’s play Anima, War Variations has as its core concern the body’s reinscription with the language of joy. Or, as Shoshana Felman describes in Writing and Madness (Literature/​Philosophy/​Psychoanalysis) (2003), “[p]‌oetry becomes a way of knowing the body without the intervention of consciousness, communicating directly with the very body of language” (266). I use the expression “armed conflict” to get at the copresence of discourses of sexuality and of warfare within her poetry:  arms are for killing, but also (as the bumper sticker says) arms are for hugging. It is here that we might differentiate Rosselli from Plath, whose opus is equally concerned with sex and violence, as well as with sexual violence, often inflected with a lethal potential not typical of Rosselli. Think, for example, of Plath’s “Strumpet Song” from The Colossus (1960): Time comes round for that foul slut: Mere bruit of her takes our street/​Until every man, Red, pale or dark, Veers to her slouch/​Mark, I  cry, that mouth/​Made to do violence on,/​That seamed face/​Askew with blotch, dint, scar/​Struck by each dour year. (51) For both women, love is a battlefield, but only for the Italian is defeat as satisfying as victory.15 Where Plath’s strumpet invokes sex as an externalized stand-​in for the partly covert desire for self-​violence, Rosselli’s poetic subject overtly welcomes her vanquishing; indeed, her own ravishment is the stated goal. It is not my assertion that these poems are not about war. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that Rosselli is also concerned with the representation of actual casualties of real wars, the most famous of which is perhaps her “In preda ad uno shock violentissimo”: a poem about the 1944 massacre of 335 Italians at the Ardeatine Caves outside of Rome as a retaliation for partisan-​inflicted Nazi casualties. But amongst these there are also interspersed figures whose death is instead metaphorical.The predominance of sex over war is evident both at the thematic level –​beds abound in this collection, and these are put to varied uses –​and in the deployment of multivalent images such as that of the figure reclining, either in an invitation to love, or in 206

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position of post-​coital volupté, as much as in the pose of death throes. And on some level, critics seem aware of this. Consider, as an example, Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo’s much-​touted inclusion of Rosselli’s work in his anthology (Poeti italiani del novecento), which reads as a veiled homage to écriture feminine:16 la poesia è qui vissuta anzitutto come abbandono al flusso buio e labirintico della vita psichica e dell’immaginario, producendo una sorta di simultaneità e ubiquità della rappresentazione, e l’abolizione di ogni confine fra interno ed esterno, privato e pubblico-​sociale (here poetry is lived first and foremost as an abandonment to the dark and labyrinthine flux of psychic life and of the imaginary, producing a kind of simultaneity and ubiquity of representation, and the abolition of every boundary between internal and external, private and social-​public). (995) Alongside the psychic assessment here is a submerged discourse that first genders the poet’s body; and second, codes it as a kind of linguistic Kristevan abject: what should have remained inside the tightly swaddled, laminar flow of poetic language has given way to a turbulence (a dark and labyrinthine flux) that threatens to overflow its channels and engulf the reader. At stake here, then, is arguably something other than Rosselli’s language. Equally dangerous, it seems, is the way that language invokes the poet herself as a situated subject (the Mobius strip of Rosselli’s psychopathology to which I referred earlier): her historical position leads to madness, which leads to an abject aesthetics, and these in turn reproduce her historical position. Let me illustrate by focusing on the image of pearls, which emerge at various points throughout the text and serve as nodal points around which, in Lucia Re’s words, war’s “metaphysical proportions, as a structural condition of being and human existence” are quilted together with their specular opposite, love (Rosselli 2005, 17). These first appear in the dual form of pearls strung together, and of the interlocutor’s neck, itself pearly. Here is the poem in its entirety:17 E l’albeggiare sarà /​quella fila di perle tu porti ogn’ora slacciato sul tuo perleo collo, smagrito, o! le /​ossa camuffate, che premono, nel eccitato sconvolto riso. E tu le bende porterai su quei tendini /​spezzati dalla furia di amare/​giocondamente. (And the dawning will be that string of pearls you wear always untied on your pearly thinning neck, o! the muffled bones that press in the excited dazed laughter. And you will wear bandages on those tendons snapped by the fury of loving joyfully. (Roselli 2005, 32–​33) First, let’s note here the difference between the bleak, dusky brutality we noticed in Plath, whose strumpet has “That seamed face/​Askew with blotch, dint, scar/​Struck by each dour year,” in sharp contrast with the bright, ecstatic dawning of Rosselli’s figure. Plath, of course, is describing the strumpet of her poem’s title; less clear is the subject of Rosselli’s poem. We see here, as elsewhere in Rosselli’s poetry, the sliding –​or better yet, the intermittent superimposition –​of the speaking subject, the io, and the interlocutor, the tu, such that the neck and the necklace may both belong to the speaker, or possibly to the speaker and her lover, respectively. The gender switching of speaking subject is typical of Rosselli’s poetry in this collection and elsewhere (her nouns and adjectives, too, often change gender). Here, the attribution of beads or pearls, similarly, shifts between the sexes so that they belong to or issue from both male and female bodies. This raises the possibility that the pearl necklace is a reference to the form of erotic play by the same name, linked semantically to a phallic image a few pages later: “la tua 207

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ascia di perle di amore” [your pearly axe of love] (50). Like her other poetry collections –​Sleep chief among them –​Variazioni belliche is marked by a tendency to lexical iteration and analepsis, that is, to repetitions and imbrication of syllables, words and phrases, which function to create a sort of snowball effect of meanings as the same phrase is repeated and built upon.With Varizioni belliche we may extend these observations beyond the economy of the individual poems, since one of Rosselli’s poetic techniques involves intermittently reiterating phrases or series of phrases that interlink with one another across the collection –​for example, the poem Contiamo infiniti cadaveri (We count endless corpses [104]) is followed immediately by Contiamo infiniti morti! (We count endless dead! [106]), and a close variant in another collection, Documento (1966–​1973), we see Contare i prigionieri (To count the prisoners [67]). The effect of such a technique is two-​ fold. The polysemic, stratified construction of sound, word, and imagery within and across the poems creates a tight network of multiple meanings, a hypertext, of meanings superimposed one upon the other in such a way that interpretation is potentially infinite and perpetually indeterminate. In Variazioni belliche, analogous examples of this structure of return or echo are readily visible when we range across the span of the text. For example, the hermeneutically mutual reinforcement of the close juxtaposition of the pearl necklace and the pearly axe of love that we saw just now reverses itself in another pairing. This time, the pearl appears in the form of a forehead pearly or beaded with sweat from physical battle of consumerist capitalism (Rosselli 2005, 142), which anticipates its ideological opposite a few pages later in a poem rife with images of Communism (Rosselli 2005, 150). But pearls or beads are equally central as figurative echo in the pearly forehead upon which the speaking subject’s eye alights during lovemaking, suspended over her like a starry sky: Se dalle tue protese braccia scorgevo un’altra irrequietudine/​se dal tuo amore tutti i lumi si spegnevano: se dall’amore nasceva disordine e immoralità, se per il tuo occhio lucido e la tua fronte perlata io scorgevo un altro cielo ed un’altra luce nel cielo ed i colori farsi più vividi: se dal tuo amare le amare ozie della vita scorgevo in me un difetto allora correvo ai ripari (If from your outstretched arms I spotted another restlessness/​if from your love all the lights were turned off; if from love disorder and immorality were born; if for your sparkling eye and your pearly forehead I spotted another sky and another light in the sky and the colors getting brighter; if from your loving the bitter laziness of life I spotted a flaw in me then I ran for shelter). (Rosselli 2005, 218) Here physical love leads to a kind of post-​coital limbo or purgatory, a state entered into in another poem in which the figure of Antigone (who peoples Rosselli’s works with some regularity) watches over not the dead and unburied body of the brother but the detumescent member of the lover, figured variously as a dying dragon and a salami vendor (her work is not without humor!). Further iterations of the phallus-​pearl re-​dimension mortal armed combat as interiorized palace intrigue. In I tuoi occhi di ceramica (Rosselli 2005, 350), the beloved body on its “throne of meat and desperation” (sul tuo trono di viande e di disperazioni [Rosselli 2005, 350]) at last finds peace, “buried by now in my long and triumphant arms of love and lust queen of the night and stars” (seppellito oramai nelle mie lunghe braccia trionfanti d’amore e di lussuria regina della notte e delle stelle) (Rosselli 2005, 350). Finally, pearls are invoked along with Jesus in a military tank (304), proleptically anticipating the poem a few pages later in which the poetic I counts pearls (“contavo perle”) as she ambivalently declares rebirth (Colma di ansie tributarie rinascevo a miglior vita –​Full of tributary anxieties I was reborn to a better life [322]). It is here that the collection takes a decided turn for the happier: the declaration is followed 208

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soon after by a group of approximately 20 poems dedicated to love, both erotic and platonic. It would be oversimplifying to say that this last group of poems is unvarnished in its exaltation of love –​its message is, in fact, more ambivalent than that –​but the overall sensation upon reading them in the order in which they are presented is that they represent a kind of emotional climax driven by the twin engines of physical desire and compromise. There are myriad other poems that support my assertion about the erotic economy of this collection’s concerns. If as the saying goes, love is war, then so, apparently, is sex:  hence the semantic proximity of carnage and the carnal. Thus, Variazioni belliche are at once war variations and, as Lucia Re notes, following Rosselli’s predilection for linguistic interferences, variations on its antithesis, il bello –​the beautiful (Rosselli 2005, 13). Not organized violence, but rather love is depicted by Rosselli as the undoing of all that is organized or rational, including language itself. Moving away from readings of Variazioni belliche that focus closely on the poet’s position within the nexus of her father’s, grandmother’s, and Plath’s relations to History –​and, as we saw, on a psychopathology written shorthand as a supposed singularity of aesthetics –​permits a reading that recuperation of the weapon as that object which is proper as much to pleasure as it is to pain.

Writing and history What are the stakes of this revision? The conflicts between public and private life, and between metaphor (pearls, salami, dragons) and mimesis (Ardeatine caves, bombs, infinite cadavers) at odds with each other in this text, would seem to support the impulse to read Variazioni belliche through the key of Rosselli’s death and, specifically, to understand her particular use of language as a symptom of historical trauma as it is inscribed upon and introjected by Rosselli, and consequently invalidated by her death. What we see, in other words, is the critical inversion of the terms of Trauerarbeit: in that reading, Rosselli does not turn trauma into text, but text into trauma. It is an inversion that always already takes into account her suicide. I contend that the terms on which her collection was received indicate that for some readers, the historicizing critical discourse serves as a kind of fig leaf with which to veil the possibly discomfiting spectacle of female sexuality in a pathologized subject. Hence the general critical aversion to an eroticized reading of this text, and of the disabled subject more broadly: the practices of sex and the project of Trauerarbeit are already hard to reconcile; in the case of mental illness, it is almost too much to face the two together. But this position –​that Rosselli’s suicide is evidence of the failure of writing as a form of Trauerarbeit –​ is given the lie by both the fact of her writing, and the use to which she puts it: if she can make hay from the putative trauma of her historical position, the sun must still be shining. What Felman calls madness –​“the translation of oneself –​into the otherness of languages” (19) –​here, is thus also its own antidote. I would argue, then, that when we bracket, however temporarily, the poet’s suicide but not her oeuvre’s consistent engagement with disability, and tend carefully to the writings, Rosselli’s literal and figurative embodiment of historical trauma becomes, too, the embodiment of recovery. And the “strangeness” of writing is by this logic born not from an exigency of illness but of identity –​the translation of oneself –​into a form with which to establish kinships of preference (the anima of her grandmother’s play?), and not necessarily of birth. This writerly recovery comprises her genealogy even more than the historical players themselves, if we consider that the writings last long after their creators have ceased to exist. Thus, Rosselli’s writing challenges the critical urge to reconstitute Rosselli as a victim of the forces of history, even while it recognizes the roots of a history that is both of, and from, the dead. Rosselli’s writings provoke the feelings of strangeness that is proper to madness; that is proper to literature. Its resistance to 209

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the where (reader and author as competing sites for the production of meaning) and to the who (essentialism and constructivism, as competing paradigms of conceiving the foundation of the subject) of interpretation implicates the fundamental disavowal upon which all subjectivity is constituted.18 Moreover, Rosselli’s text thus unbinds or calls into question the coherence of the ego as well as of the authorities of Logos, Law, and Father, not in order to supplant them with a strictly feminine genealogy or a subject fortified by her own constituting disavowal, but in order to point out its utter, potentially devastating precariousness, thus articulated by Rosselli: “nor do I want your interpretation, having none myself ” (Rosselli 1992, 124). In this way, the imposition of whatever forms of authority from which she might have sought liberation –​including history –​continues, unabated, opening up the infinite next hermeneutical world.19

Notes 1 See, for example, Silvia De March. 2 See her Epistolario familiare. Carlo, Nello Rosselli e la madre (1914–​1937) (Sugar Co., 1979). 3 For a full bibliography of Pincherle Rosselli’s works, see pages 27–​30 of her Memorie. 4 Emilio Lussu once compared Amelia Pincherle Rosselli to Cornelia. Lussu, Emilio, ‘Carlo Rosselli’ in GL 25 June 1937. Cited in Pugliese p. 92. 5 On Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, see Aldo Rosselli’s reconstruction of her early years. 6 Amelia Pincherle Rosselli, Anima. Dramma in tre atti, ed. Natalia Costa Zalessow (Salerno Editore, 1997). 7 See Baldacci p. 141 as well as Emmanuela Tandello’s discussion of Plath’s 1959 poem “Electra on Azalea Path,” in which Plath confronts her father’s tomb for the first time, is apposite as well for the way it imbricates the figures of Electra, Plath, Rosselli, and their fathers. Tandello, Amelia Rosselli. La fanciulla e l’infinito (Donzelli, 2007), pp. 39–​42. 8 She also mentions John Berryman on a number of occasions in her list of “all-​time greats.” 9 See Baldacci pp. 140–​143 on her engagements in 1975, 1985, and 1991 with Plath. 10 Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” in Ariel, Harper Collins Perennial Classics, 1999, pp. 6–​9. 11 Rosselli herself contributed to this assessment when she refuted the epithet “cosmopolitan” attributed to her by Pasolini in the 1963 Menabò essay with which he introduced her early poems (pp.  68–​ 69): “Noi non eravamo dei cosmopoliti; eravamo dei rifugiati” (We weren’t cosmopolitan; we were refugees). In Caputo, p.  9. Again, see Baldacci, Amelia Rosselli, especially the section entitled “Una vita sotto assedio” pp. 10–​16; 25; 26; 35. For a more complex view, see Mario Moroni’s chapter on Rosselli as well as Emmanuela Tandello who begins her Amelia Rosselli: La fanciulla e l’infinito with not the usual two but four deaths: her father’s and uncle’s, her mother’s, and Rocco Scotellaro’s. Attilio Manzi redimensions her work within the varying sites of literal and figurative exile (pp. 339–​345). See also Silvia De March, pp. 15–​19. Manuela Manera, in contrast, refutes the poet’s reduction to her biographical data when she says, à propos Rosselli’s trilinguism, “le commistioni linguistiche sono non inevitabile traccia di inalienabile condizione biografica, ma ricercata scelta di adeguatezza espressiva” (the linguistic mixtures are not the inevitable trace of an inalienable biographic condition, but the highly-​sought choice of expressive adequacy [267]). 12 Her work is “per certi versi unica, senza pari nel panorama della poesia italiana del secondo Novecento” (In some ways unique, without peer in the panorama of Italian poetry of the late 20th century). Baldacci, p.  3. Andrea Zanzotto remarks, “Improbabili o nulla i suoi effettivi rapporti con scuole o gruppi” (unlikely or nonexistent [are] her effective relations with schools or groups [of poetry] [11]). For Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Rosselli’s poetry “resta un fenomeno in sostanza unico nel panorama letterario italiano” (remains a substantially unique phenomenon in the Italian literary panorama [994]). For Ann Snodgrass, Rosselli’s supposed uniqueness is tied up in questions of gender. For a discussion of Italian poetry anthologies, see Lucia Re, “(De)Constructing the Canon: The Agon of the Anthologies on the Scene of Modern Italian Poetry,” The Modern Language Review 87.3 (1992): 585–​602. 13 Amelia Rosselli, Variazioni belliche (Milano:  Garzanti, 1964). All references in this paper are to War Variations.Translated and edited by Lucia Re and Paul Vangeli (Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2005). 14 Elizabeth Leake, After Words. Suicide and Authorship in 20th Century Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 15 See “Medusa” (Ariel 1965), and “Strumpet Song,”“The Faun,” and “Snakecharmer” (The Colossus, 1960). 16 For a discussion of Italian poetry anthologies, see Lucia Re, “(De)Constructing the Canon.”

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Rosselli’s War Variations 17 The translation of the poem is theirs. 18 See Octave Mannoni, “Je sais bien mais quand même…” in Clefs pour l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre Scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969). 19 Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Portions of this paper were published in “ ‘Nor do I want your interpretation’: Suicide, Surrealism, and the Site of Illegibility in Amelia Rosselli’s Sleep,” Romanic Review, vol. 97, no.3–​4, May–​Nov 2006: 445–​459.

Works cited Baldacci, Alessandro. Amelia Rosselli. Gius. Rome-​Bari: Laterza e figli, 2007. Caputo, Francesca. Amelia Rosselli: una scrittura plurale. Novara: Interlinea edizioni, 2004. De March, Silvia. Amelia Rosselli tra poesia e storia. Naples: L’ancora del Mediterraneo, 2006. Felman, Shoshana. Writing and Madness (Literature/​Philosophy/​Psychoanalysis). Translated by Martha Noel Evans. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2003. Leake, Elizabeth. After Words. Suicide and Authorship in 20th Century Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Manera, Manuela. “L’ydioma tripharium di Amelia Rosselli. Ricognizioni linguistiche.” Lingua e stile, vol.38, 2003, p.267. Mannoni, Octave. “Je sais bien mais quand même…,” in Clefs pour l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre Scène. Paris: Seuil, 1969. Manzi, Attilio. “El Espacio y la Palabra:  Reflexiones Acerca del Exilio Poético de Amelia Rosselli,” in Exilios Femeninos, ed. Pilar Cuder-​Domínguez. Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, Instituto Andaluz de la Mujer, 2000, pp.339–​345. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. Poeti italiani del Novecento. Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder, editors. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association, 2002. Moroni, Mario. “Amelia Rosselli,” in La presenza complessa. Identità e soggettività nelle poetiche del Novecento. Ravenna: Longo, 1998, pp.129–​144. Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus,” in Ariel. New York: Harper Collins Perennial Classics, 1999. Pugliese, Stanislao. Carlo Rosselli:  Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile. Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1999. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness. Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2007. Re, Lucia. “(De)Constructing the Canon: The Agon of the Anthologies on the Scene of Modern Italian Poetry.” The Modern Language Review, vol.87, no.3, 1992, pp. 585–​602. Rosselli, Aldo. La famiglia Rosselli: Una tragedia italiana. Milan: Leonardo Paperback, 1992. Rosselli, Amelia. Variazioni belliche. Milan: Garzanti, 1964. Rosselli, Amelia. Documento (1966–​1973). Milan: Garzanti, 1976. Rosselli, Amelia. Epistolario familiare. Carlo, Nello Rosselli e la madre (1914-​193). Milan: Sugar Co., 1979. Rosselli, Amelia. Sleep: Poesie in inglese. Emmanuela Tandello. Milan: Garzanti Editore, 1992. Rosselli, Amelia. War Variations. Translated and edited by Lucia Re and Paul Vangeli. Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2005. Rosselli, Amelia Pincherle. Anima. Dramma in tre atti. Edited by Natalia Costa Zalessow. Rome: Salerno Editore, 1997. Snodgrass, Ann. Knowing Noise.The English Poems of Amelia Rosselli. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Tandello, Emmanuela. Amelia Rosselli. La fanciulla e l’infinito. Rome: Donzelli, 2007. Zanzotto, Andrea. “Care rischiose parole sibylline,” in Corriere della Sera, July 18, 1976.

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18 GETTING THERE Pain poetics and Canadian literature Shane Neilson

Pain has been memorably covered by scholars like Tobin Siebers (“In the Name of Pain”) and Alison Patsavas (who has contributed a “cripistimology of pain”) in different contexts within disability studies, yet pain also remains something of an outlier to the disability poetics movement. Petra Kuppers’s “Towards a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch” from 2009 is an early Western attempt to articulate a poetics of disability with pain as a subcategory, drawing on Deleuzoguattarian concepts in order to “hold a wide variety of experiences and structured positions in moments of precarious productive imbalance” (223). This Deleuzian approach has been taken up by other disability scholars, including Margrit Shildrick, yet the results are fluid and destabilizing readings that (purposely) don’t cohere but rather proceed rhizomatically. Though I  acknowledge the value of the Deleuzian approach, I  wish to bring forward the essential intersubjectivity of pain as a productive theoretical basis for engagement. This chapter is, additionally, an attempt to incrementally bring pain more into the fold of poetics. A final organizing vector is nation, for I feel the Canadian context lags far behind the American one in terms of the prominence of disability justice issues within the Canadian literature (dis) community. (To name just one example, Canada has yet to have produced a disability poetics anthology.) Because I cannot bring forth a thorough canonical exploration of Canadian poetry using the subject of pain, I have decided to use poems written coincident with the rise of disability studies as a field –​meaning from the 1960s on. I also restrict my archive chronologically because this is the period coinciding with the rise of Canadian literary nationalism and the development of what is regarded by some as a distinctively “Canadian” literature. I write from the subject position of a marginalized physician who self-​identifies as disabled, but also as someone who does not have the lived experience of chronic pain. I trust that others will build on this preliminary work which is bipartite: I begin by considering the structural preferences as to why pain has largely eluded a poetics to date –​it is important to recognize the barriers erected against such a poetics –​and move to a reading of pain through the lens of intersubjectivity.

A Levinasian intersubjectivity (in brief) In “Scars in disability culture poetry: towards connection,” Kuppers suggests that “[s]‌cars, pain, wounds and the places where they are born are strong subjects in crip poetry, as they both embody and make available to discourse the knitting together of meaning out of breath, flesh 212

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and language…scars as connections to more than self can open up to another magic, another hope” (141). Rather than marks of destruction, Kuppers invests scars as sites of connection and “production” that “are not signs of negativity and loss or reminders of victimhood” (148). Kuppers is careful to acknowledge that such scars also reflect “the very real pain that many disabled people live through both physically and in their encounters with institutions” (148) but for the purposes of this chapter, Kuppers’s theorization of scars as not necessarily negative metaphors of connection connects with the work of Emmanuel Levinas and thereby to intersubjectivity. In his well-​known essay “Useless Suffering” (1982), Emmanuel Levinas calls suffering a “passivity,” “precisely an evil,” and a “pure undergoing” (92). Initially proposing that suffering is “intrinsically useless” and “for nothing,” Levinas focuses on intolerable situations by mentioning “intolerable lumbagos” and “the tortures experienced by certain patients stricken with malignant tumours” (93). Levinas ventilates the concept of pain as hell-​without-​exit by suggesting the actual purpose of pain is to present the “possibility of a half opening, and more precisely, the possibility that wherever a moan, a cry, a groan or a sign happen there is the original call for aid, for curative help, for help from the other ego whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation” (93). “The other” becomes audience, promise of relief, and chief beneficent of the call because “the other” is sought for the benefit of “the other.” Levinas writes that “pure suffering, which is intrinsically senseless and condemned to itself with no way out” (93) can be remediated when “a beyond appears in the form of the inter-​ human” (94). By virtue of being observed in another, suffering finds its real subject and thereby becomes the imperative of empathy. Inter-​human connectivity is the consequence of Levinas’s theorized “bond of human subjectivity” (94). In a metaphoric sense, pain becomes Kuppers’s “connective tissue” (142) between human beings. “Intersubjectivity” is defined by the Oxford Companion to Philosophy as: the status of being somehow accessible to at least two (usually all, in principle) minds or “subjectivities”. It thus implies that there is some sort of communication between those minds; which in turn implies that each communicating mind is aware not only of the existence of the other but also of its intention to convey information to the other. The idea, for theorists, is that if subjective processes can be brought into agreement, then perhaps that is as good as the (unattainable?) status of being objective –​ completely independent of subjectivity. (n. pag) Habermas approaches a definition of intersubjectivity with the following: the term “intersubjective” no longer refers to the result of an observed convergence of thoughts or representations of various persons, but to the prior commonality of a linguistic pre understanding or horizon of the lifeworld –​which, from the perspective of the participants themselves, is presupposed –​within which the members of communication community find themselves before they reach an understanding with one another about something in the world. (355–​6) For the purposes of my analysis, the “agreement” mentioned by the Oxford Companion and Habermas’s “prior commonality” can be metaphorized as “meeting”  –​two subjectivities interacting to create a possible constructive zone where pain is apprehended and possibly empathized with.This is a more complex method than seeing pain in metaphor only, amounting to “reading pain into” any text in which there is a physical or affective aversive phenomenon. 213

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In the second part of this chapter, I will “read pain into” various Canadian poems in order to demonstrate the utility of the method; but for the moment, I move on to document the structural problems a disability poetics faces on the way to construction.

Impediments to a disability poetics: narrative preferences, body as formal metaphor The preference for narrative within disability studies itself –​and perhaps more broadly, the privilege of prose over poetry as a substrate for scholarly analysis –​is one of the reasons why pain lacks a poetics within the field. Michael Bérubé, for example, has written that “disability demands a story” (43). G. Thomas Couser writes that “the scar, the limp, the missing limb, or the obvious prosthesis –​ calls for a story” (457). By analysing narrative, disability studies critics have discovered several toxic tropes that enter into mainstream stories involving disability –​for example, the “supercrip” and the “disabled villain” –​but what can a study of poetry offer? Might establishing a poetics open up, as Alice Hall wonders in Disability and Literature (2015), “a reconfigur[ing of] the ways in which we think about the form of literary texts as well as their content” (13)? Lennard Davis maintains that “When one speaks of disability…[it] immediately becomes part of a chronotope, a time-​sequenced narrative, embedded in a story” (304).This chapter explores what happens in poetry, which is often achronological and not necessarily dependent upon time as an ordering principle. This remains true in the Canadian context. As yet there is no study of Canadian literature that explores narrative representations of pain, let alone the subcategory of poetic strategies to represent pain. Sally Chivers’s chapter “Survival of the Fittest: CanLit and Disability” in the Oxford Handbook to Canadian Literature offers a historical survey of representations of disability in Canadian literature. Chivers brings forth canonical prose voices for analysis like Margaret Atwood,Timothy Findley,Anne Marie Macdonald, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Thomson Highway. Poetry is not considered in detail. In addition to the field’s preference for narrative, another reason to account for the lack of a disability pain poetics might be what Mark Osteen has identified as the social model’s “neo-​Cartesian duality –​its separation of body from mind, of impairment from disability” leading to inadequate theorizations of pain as an experience (3). The irony should not be lost on those who have lived experience of chronic pain, for the epistemology of biomedicine works the same way. For example, Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2011), a seminal disability poetics anthology in the US, states in its preface that poets with “a visible disability” were chosen according to a strict interpretation of the “social model of disability” (Bartlett 15). If, as Patsavas argues, the “belief that all disabled people experience pain and that all pain leads to suffering runs through popular discourses to create entrenched ways of ‘knowing’ pain and disability” (203–​4), it is strange that pain is often left out of disability poetry anthologies. How else to resist and possibly renovate the familiar attitudes Patsavas mentions, since they lead to such ironically observable harms? A hierarchy is thus established in a formative anthology, though it is a hierarchy shared in disability studies scholarship too. For example, in “Voice and Poetry,” the penultimate chapter in Hall’s Literature and Disability (2016), the poets who come in for analysis have physical deficits which manifest themselves in their poems. Hall’s chapter considers pathological processes that somehow destabilize communication –​like in the work of Norma Cole and the late Tomas Transtromer, both of whom had strokes. Both poets problematize the concept of speech as the venerated conduit or representative of thought, and in the case of Cole, delivery of her work with speech deficits relating to the stroke productively displays speech as an altered conduit. As Alice Hall writes in her analysis of the crip poetics of Jim Harris, such substrates “celebrate disabled experience, and…explore the possibilities of the new poetic forms that are generated from the perspectives of ‘abnormal’ bodies and minds” (156). 214

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The most obvious way to demonstrate such a point occurs by focusing on visibly embodied conditions, as is the case in Beauty Is a Verb’s “Toward a New Language of Embodiment” chapter, where experimental poets are included with the explicit rationale that “disability is manifested directly through physical connection to the writing. Rather than explaining an individual story, bodily condition is manifested through the form” (19). In a strange way, the ethic of destabilisation within crip poetics has become deterministic. The trouble with a body-​based disability aesthetics in the case of pain is that pain is a very poor fit. The locus should be that of the body-​mind. Consider Tobin Siebers’s materialist conception of aesthetics in which the human body “is both the subject and object of aesthetic production” when in contact with the sensations of other bodies (Disability Aesthetics 1). Compared to the sensation of pain, bodies are relatively easy to represent in poems. It is harder to create an aesthetics of what is immaterial, there being no direct-​mapping or confirmatory coordinates with which to verify representations in the real world. Yet the real world is what crip poetics seems to prefer, and with justification. Jim Ferris’s seminal essay “Crip Poetics, or How I Learned to Love the Limp” is quoted in Beauty Is a Verb as follows:  “Disability poetry can be recognized by several characteristics:  a challenge to stereotypes and an insistence on self-​definition; foregrounding of the perspective of people with disabilities; an emphasis on embodiment, especially atypical embodiment; and alternative techniques and poetics” (25). This sequence of elements reflects the field’s development: first, the challenging of stereotypes; then an emphasis through representation of the lived experiences of disabled persons in non-​negative registers; then a demonstration of “atypical embodiment” that in the literature seems to represent most of what is offered as a poetics; and then a poetics. Yet the work typically done on poetry in disability studies often focuses on form in that predictable way: form is juxtaposed or fused with body. (Deaf poet? Then ASL presents meaningful formal possibilities for expression, etc.) On the one hand, these are important connections to make. But on the other hand, to maintain that disrupted forms and dispersed forms are meaningful embodiments when deployed by certain individuals with metaphorically-​conceptually corresponding impairments is obvious. Pain destabilizes such concretist assumptions. In this light, the potentially meaningful embodiments of crip poetics might read as a gruesome latter-​ day graft of physical form with poetic form. A  final problematic is the fact that, as Sharon L. Snyder explains in “Infinities of Forms: Disability Figures in Artistic Traditions,” “…a disability source will often anchor explanations for artistic origins even as it will seem to explain away other motives” (174). What if the other motives are important to include in the poetics? It is important to note that chronic pain is often not localizable in a pathophysiological sense and can lack an inciting injury. Is the emphasis on the body a troublesome one for theorizing pain experience in the disability studies context? Does pain adopt a recognizable form? What is the place of pain?

Towards a poetics of pain: cultural trauma, location, agency Using the Canadian nation’s metaphorical body of literature allows for inroads into a poetics of pain outside the main hub of disability studies (America). Because of Canada’s vexed relationship with Indigenous peoples, this overview of Canadian pain poetics starts with brief consideration of pain as it is metaphorized as cultural trauma, a fitting start not only because of its chiming in with origins of the nation but also because the pain experienced by Indigenous peoples as a result of colonialism lacks a concrete place in the body, just as chronic pain in biomedical terms lacks a concrete/​discrete pathophysiological lesion. In other words, the habitual 215

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elusiveness of pain finds a metaphorical correspondent in the cultural trauma of Indigenous persons –​especially in terms of the destruction wrought by residential schools –​as written out in the work of many poets, including Louise Halfe (Burning in this Midnight Dream), Chris Bose (Stone the Crow), and Jeannette Armstrong (Breath Tracks). Metaphors of healing and transcendence abound in such works. Armand Garnett Ruffo, poet, academic, and member of the Ojibwe nation, has written that cultural trauma is part of “the psyche” (3) but also that strength can be drawn from collective pain. Ruffo’s poem “Power” makes this case well, asking in its first line “From where does the Power come?” The answer is not given as “pain” straightaway; instead, the answer is situated in the gaze of “old ones” who see power in a series of images: in a moment of desert twilight in a basket of slithering snakes, lumbering in a white-​tipped bear, flying in a crow that speaks. (3) That the knowledge of the location of power exists in elders is important: they are the ones with the greatest exposure to pain, the longest witnessing. Pain is not just seen in animal imagery –​the elders also “see it in you” (7). This cultural transmission is an investment on the part of the elders, who have historically witnessed trauma and who yet recognize strength in those who come after. The power spoken of in the poem is something that requires caution –​ after all, we are told to “Beware” (8) –​it is a frightening power to endure. In a ground-​shaking moment for the Canadian nation, some key figures in Canadian media joked about creating an “appropriation prize” (Fearon) for a writer who could best steal and repurpose cultural tropes. The jest was made in response to a rising Indigenous power in the Canadian nation and the increasingly effective resistance Indigenous voices are posing to others who wish to tell Indigenous stories. In a moving and widely-​heard interview on CBC radio that centred on the “pain in [Wente’s] community” exacerbated by “hav[ing] to re-​argue for our value as human beings, on our own land,” Wente explained how responsibility and community create this kind of power to preserve and protect: I wish there were so many more stories written about Indigenous people. But those stories come with responsibility. Indigenous people know this all too well, we are beholden to our communities. When we say these things, we know exactly who will hold us responsible. Who is that for non-​Indigenous writers, when they don’t have these connections to the community? Do they truly understand the reason that these stories are sacred? As Wente knows, colonial power takes. Using a voice with the power to name sufferers and exterminate the speaker’s kin, Ruffo’s poem continues:           In the voice that calls four times your name when wife and children are murdered. (3) But it is also a power that comes from an internal voice, a survivalist power that exchanges weaponry (bullet) for breath:

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Tells you no bullet will harm you (as none ever does) as it breathes into you. (3) It is the weaponry that becomes organic in a scene of painlessness that is the poem’s concluding moment of power: what maims and kills is made powerless to injure, demonstrating that inherent to the destructive metaphors for pain is resistance to destruction.To modify Nietzsche, what can hurt us can make us stronger –​or as Wente said in his interview in a halting, breaking voice: “If anything [the resistance to the appropriation prize] proves our strength as a community and our endurance. Don’t mistake my emotion here, or my civility anywhere, as weakness. This is our strength, this is me being in touch with my ancestors and feeling them sitting beside me” (n. pag). Ancient Greeks who visited the abaton knew that poetry is a source of healing. The same principle is at work with the Inuit Traditional Song “Magic Words/​Nakasuk,” a chant for the healing of wounds: You, like a ringed plover; You, like a wild duck, The skin’s surface here, Full of wounds, Full of cuts, Go and patch it! (9) Medicine in this poem is being levied as song. The poem remains in the zone of damage metaphor (wound) but the representational strategy is alternative in that the wound is foregrounded in a framework of healing. Admittedly, this is but a step from the primary problem (of metaphors of damage that are destructive) but the difference is significant:  to deal in metaphor for a moment, consider a sword. Alter the course of this sword slightly and it might not hit its mark; a mother or a child could live from such a slight change. Furthermore, the containment of wounds in a nurturing/​convalescent framework is more positivist than the proliferation of wounds in a war metaphor framework. Trying to determine the bodily location of pain through listening to a patient history is, in a medical sense, the point of taking a history. “Magic Words/​Nakasuk” is precise, denoting a “here” that is the place of injury. Locating pain is to be given a kind of power over that pain, an understanding or grasp of it that is not confined to Levinas’s concept of pain as “pure undergoing” (92). Outside of extreme suffering, pain can be apprehended.This apprehension is a form of mastery, limited but significant. Intersubjectivity changes the lens a little and makes the poem less about mastery and more of a shared imbrication in which two or more persons interact for the purposes of achieving cure and alleviating suffering. Pain is both localized on the body but it is also somehow between two people. With the nation appropriately localized as the site of genocide against Indigenous peoples, I move on to consider bp Nichol’s prose poem “Sum of the Parts,” a poem that represents the difficulty of locating pain from a patient’s perspective. Beginning with “So many things inside me I am not in touch with. So many things I depend on that I never see” (234), Nichol’s poem contends that the interiority of the body is, to someone without exposure to anatomy labs or

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operating suites, essentially a mystery. To the non-​professional, the physical self is somehow other: if you’re lucky, “you never get to meet” (234) the diseased body part, but luckiness means you also don’t get to hear “the real organ music” that is “the harmony…the way different organs play together, work, and that level beyond consciousness of which all consciousness is composed, the real unconscious, the unseen” (234). If disorder forces the mixed benefit of corporeality to the fore, unfortunately the “real organ music” during wellness is a song we both depend on as we fail to apprehend it. If we can’t locate our organs when healthy, how can we know them when we are not well? Is pain a true signal? Nichol continues this melancholic interrogation by admitting that he can “do the research, read the books” (234) but he can’t know his organs as a medical professional would. Nevertheless, he conducts his own research using his own body because of ailments he faces. He moves to two specific medical investigations in the final segments of “Sum of the Parts.” In the penultimate segment, he undergoes a radioactive Iodine “thyroid scan” for a “goiter” (234). While on the table, the speaker “think[s]‌about [his] thyroid” and feels his “nose itching” and also a “dry throat” (235). After these relatively simple sensations, he suddenly becomes “aware” of his thyroid “tho I couldn’t see it” (235). It is this imaginative feeling-​into process conducted during a medical investigation representing the thyroid gland as radiograph that gives the speaker an acquaintance with his organs on a visceral level. Test results are a second-​hand measure of knowing; a first-​hand measure is an anatomic pathology result of biopsied flesh; but Nichol needs a mysterious knowledge that is “third hand.” In the final segment, we move to pain as the means for third-​hand knowledge: “After I threw my back out I had more X-​Rays. X-​Rays of the lumbar sacrum region” (235). Nichol remains worried about his ignorance of organ music: “You live your whole life making do with only the reflections of certain parts, making do with simply the names of your inner organs, their descriptions in books, while all around you are people who may actually have seen them, know directly what you only glimpse third-​hand” (235). He privileges the knowledge of “Doctors and Nurses” and even goes so far as to resist metaphor and denigrate his personal knowledge when writing of “blood flow” and “heart pulse,” a knowledge based in literature, by arguing “these aren’t just metaphors you know these aren’t just similes. It is a discipline” (235). And yet the poet is about to pull off a coup, which requires backing up to explain. In the middle movement of the poem, he explains that reading in books won’t apprise him of his individual anatomy, the parts of him that make Nichol uniquely Nichol. Medicine’s textbooks “name the organs and the names are the same they’re not the same organs as the organs sitting here inside me –​the bpNichol liver, the bpNichol kidney” (234) and this failure seems to be presented as Nichol’s. As a reader of mere books on anatomy, he can’t know his own organs…but the same ignorance is possessed by medicine because medicine generalizes knowledge. Nichol seeks the help of a doctor in this movement for an unexplained ailment and he is afraid that the doctor might try to learn that specific “bp” knowledge about him, but this doesn’t happen.What happens is the speaker-​patient is told, “Collect yourself!” (234). Though delivered as imperious command, the command is received as an instruction for the self to heal itself, to hear its organ music, to listen and recalibrate the sum of its parts. The poem continues, “And you do. And he doesn’t.Which is how you want things to be” (234). It is the self in this poem, without privileged knowledge of anything other than the self, that is responsible for its own healing. This key middle movement connects with the poem’s terminus in which the speaker, immediately after insisting on the relative worthlessness of metaphor to the literary individual in the face of concrete medical knowledge, maintains “We learn to see with the third eye, to listen with the third ear, to touch the unknown with the third hand, to walk down the dark streets in search of the hidden, the unseen” (235). Nichol provides a poem that is the literal “third 218

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language” hoped for by Jennifer Bartlett in Beauty Is a Verb when she describes the motivations of the text as “look[ing] at poetry influenced by an alternate body and how this intersection forms a third language” (15). Nichol’s “we” is not a medical we but rather a community using the “third-​hand glimpse,” a community that practices the real discipline of understanding outside of specific structures of knowledge like anatomy and physiology (235). It is this seeing, listening, and touching of things unknown that reconstitutes the self. The difficulty inherent in locating pain is that it occurs in individuals and, as per Scarry, to be in pain is to “have certainty” and to observe someone in pain is to “have doubt” (13). In “The Sum of the Parts” the person with the certainty of pain needs to determine a location for their suffering themselves, and this certainty of pain is somehow derived from a “third-​hand” understanding of “organ music” when well. The “third-​hand” is also, critically, an intersubjectivity arrived at between Nichol and his health professional. A consequence of locating pain is the opportunity to control pain itself, to become the master of an injurious process. The conclusion to Ruffo’s “Power” works like that: the body of the indigene becomes a neutralizing zone. A bullet enters, yet the unharmed body reconfigures penetration as not assimilative or genocidal force but rather as itself superior without malice, as organically incorporating the weapon within. There is agency in this act, though there is a different kind of agency in Alden Nowlan’s “The Boil,” a poem that also represents the bodily site of pain as wound (staying in the zone of damage) and describes location with exactitude, the speaker’s “thumb /​and forefinger /​rolling tight” (544) against the boil of the title. Nowlan’s poem builds on the idea of location-​awareness as a kind of knowing, and therefore power, by representing control through a deliberate intervention:  “then /​forcing the spear /​of twisted cloth /​under /​the ripe core /​of the boil” (544:  10–​15). As an intervention, the “spear” exists in the realm of weaponry metaphor, and subsequent lines of the poem persist in that mode by mentioning “prying” (544) and “burning” (544). The purpose of the intervention is to be at last       master rather than       servant of the pain. (544) As Nowlan’s biographer Patrick Toner maintains, the poem is Nowlan’s attempt to “impose his will on…time and place” (11). Lineation is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s “variable foot,” suggesting a close attention to breath and a signaled awareness that the deployment of words is enacting the procedure at hand. This intervention creates a paradox of a wound healed by weapons. As the poem says, a wound made “clean” through deliberate action that, because of control, allows the speaker of the poem to find “pleasure” in the experience (544).1 The overall procedural framework of the poem is not new, for any narrative or poem that represents surgery and the instruments used during a procedure somehow represents the phantom side of weaponry. Yet control over the process by the subject who finds physical and psychological healing, not to mention pleasure, is a potent way to jar thinking away from “pure undergoing” –​this is a poem that doesn’t require an intersubjective model for positive reframing, but I include it to provide a sufferer with agency in our culture of destructive agency metaphors. Literary activists renovate pain metaphor through agency. The Prince Edward Island-​born poet Milton Acorn was a committed socialist from the outset of his writing career. Acorn 219

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was a member of the radical Canadian Liberation Movement and a recent paper in Canadian Literature acknowledges him as a “staunch labour-​oriented people’s poet” (Schmaltz 96).Though Acorn’s socialism is well-​known, what is not is how he imbued a favourite symbol, the human brain, with triple function: (1) to be the literal “target” of oppression, (2) to be the site where oppression can be resisted, and (3) to be the place where both productive and destructive pain are experienced as a result of (1) and (2). “The Fights,” an early Acorn poem from his first full-​length work, The Brain’s The Target (1960), provides the title of the collection by starting with the emphatic line “What an elusive target /​the brain is!” On a basic representational level, the poem is a dramatization of a boxing card: Come to ringside, with two experts in there! See each step or blow pivoted… See muscles wriggle, shine in sweat like windshield rain. (17) In a larger sense, “The Fights” is also an allegory for capitalism, reflecting that the two boxers as targets “set up to be knocked down /​for 25 dollars or a million” (17) according to a “game of struggle” (18). The speaker exhorts the consumers of packaged violence not to watch a “TV picture” (17) but rather to visit the event in person by “Com[ing] to ringside” (17: 17) to witness the point of boxing: to subdue an opponent by serially striking the head. Some lines later, the brain gains additional symbolic valency: more than the neural structure in an athlete’s head, the brain becomes a “target /​with its hungers and code of honour” (17). The diction suggests not just athletic “hungers and code” but also economic appetite and consequent compromised morality that Acorn often covers in many of his other works. As part of the economics of boxing, smaller cards must be held in “stinking dancehalls” (17) and “the forums of small towns” (17) where “punches are cheaper” (17) –​the bodies participating are more eagerly damageable. Acorn advocates for something other than a systematized “game of struggle” –​the human condition –​by writing, “We need something of its nature /​but not this” (18). The speaker knows what’s left of combatants is something “less than human” (18). With the brain as its dominant symbol, “The Fights” makes a simple argument: man must reject economic enslavement in order to be man. Elsewhere, Acorn’s brain symbol is used, like the body in Ruffo’s “Power,” in a more complex way: to present itself as indestructible because of its refusal to participate in an economy of harm. “I’ve Tasted My Blood,” Acorn’s signature poem, begins, If this brain’s over-​tempered consider that the fire was want and the hammers were fists. I’ve tasted my blood too much to love what I was born to. (35) Ruffo’s poem begins with elders who eventually apprise a “you” of power, but Acorn’s begins with its speaker’s brain that, if supposedly “over-​tempered,” is actually still able to absorb more because the “fire was want” –​somehow lacking. Though fists once struck this brain amidst a poetic matrix of metalworking/​industrial metaphors, the past harm was not absolute or even effective since the result was the levying of a pain (“I’ve tasted my blood too much”) that Acorn 220

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rejects and agitates against: he refuses to “love” the social condition he is “born to.” This declaration of dissidence echoes throughout the rest of the poem (and is eventually restated at its end) as it moves on to document the domestic enslavement of the speaker’s mother and the death of “playmates” in the Second World War (35). Moving from “The Fights” to “I’ve Tasted My Blood,” the parameters for social dissent broaden.The speaker’s conditional If-​brain (“If this brain’s overtempered”) recognizes the brutal social circumstances he is born in; it is the same brain that rejects those circumstances and demands relational repair. Pain is implied in the previous two “brain” poems but is not directly stated. These concerns with pain, socialism, and neurological symbols are also evident in Acorn’s non-​canonical “Poem With Fat Cats in the Background.” As can be gleaned from the title, this is a socially engaged poem. It documents the speaker’s ideas about the relationship between poverty and charity, beginning with a scene involving hobos: “Hungry men, their grins tight with embarrassment, /​move by clever steps to intercept me /​on the spit-​grey downtown streets” (49). Acorn lived much of his life as the kind of hungry man he describes in the poem, living out of the Waverly Inn in Toronto. This biographical fact is indirectly declared by the subsequent (and deliberately ironic) lines, “With my wrinkled shoes, my coat ill-​used and borrowed, /​I wonder how they know me” (49). Acorn describes the attempts of the “hungry men” to persuade him to give them money. They use manipulative gambits to make him feel “the pain of knowledge” (49), that “This is real…This is a man!” (49). The shared humanity of donor and receiver, of easy reversal, that forms part of the required painful recognition. What happens next in the poem is key: Acorn rejects the social contract of gratitude wherein he is thanked for his donation. Though a “worried arithmetic’s blown out of [his] brain”  –​ meaning his mental calculations about the small amount of money he must subsist with, and the possible metaphorically suicidal implications of the act in light of his already impecunious circumstances –​he nevertheless gives the hungry men his money. He refuses to “shake hands” (49) with them because of intense identification with their plight, resenting being “[m]‌ade a partner in Man’s indignity” (49) and wanting instead “nothing but a curse” as his reward (49). Through a neurological symbol, social ills, and personal protest, “Poem With Fat Cats in the Background” is a place where painful acknowledgements of complicity, and futility, but also solidarity occur. In this broad territory somewhere is the location not just of pain, but also of the obligation to care for one another that is based in intersubjectivity. To close out the analysis, I turn to a direct engagement with pain as entity by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-​Samarasinha, a self-​identifying “queer, sick, and disabled nonbinary femme writer” who transmutes the chronic pain of fibromyalgia into poetry in “Bad Road” (2017). The poem begins, you mean well, but when I say I hurt      when I say some part of my body hurts      and you say oh, did you do something? I hear      what did you do? As is, it’s your fault, there’s cause and effect and there’s a simple story, and if a + b = c we can fix it fast.  (1–​7) An intersubjective matrix is created through a “you” and an “I” in dialogue. Piepzna-​Samarasinha immediately problematizes the idea of injury as precondition for pain as well as the biomedical preference for the mechanical fix. For her, “there’s no simple story in this body.” Narrative is not enough, as demonstrated by the remainder of the poem that achronologically metaphorizes 221

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the human body outside of familiar body-​as-​machine formulas and into body-​as-​affectively-​ mixed-​journey (“She is forty miles of perfect bad road”) that is less about outcome and more about a process of becoming, a wisdom: I love every jounce on this bad, bad underfunded budget cut frost heave road not everyone’s car can make it down;       you gotta know       how to drive it. (60–​4) Piepzna-​ Samarasinha situates her pain amidst a wider worldly dailiness and ongoing indifference: I could tell you I moved to brooklyn for love but there’s a lot of stairs here too I could read you the particulate matter of the air, that they’re spraying for pesticides today that I ran out of the fish oil that greases my knee into smoothing, and I don’t kno –​but does anyone want to hear all that? The staying chant the recitation of everything that’s happening in my body, and their body, and the park’s body, and on the subway huffing diesel and cigarettes. (25–​35) This is not a titanic pain of certainty that screams in negative metaphor, but rather a pain of coexistence and recognition that all our individual stories are supernumerary and overflow the small container of collectivity. “Bad Road” also posits pain as a natural phenomenon –​“I say I intimate with pain tides /​This ground not steady!” (38–​9) –​that isn’t meant to be easy or simple (“Why would it be?”). Piepzna-​Samarasinha powerfully connects her current pain to layers of a painful past: “Sometimes the place where my mama threw me into the wall at three and broke my sacrum talks to me” (42–​3). Such painful moments connect within the poem to articulate a Whitmanian comprehensiveness of body: “Some days my ass leaks tidal marsh, briny river /​Some times everything everything /​everything every thing” (46–​8). To generate a Poetics of Everything Pain is impossible. My poetics is necessarily partial, and fills less of a need than poets like Piepzna-​Samarasinha accomplishing the radical work of reconfiguring pain experience. We need language called into being by technique, for we are waiting in want of a useful means of expression, one that includes alternative embodiment but also “everything /​everything every thing” else, including intersubjectivity. Until then, why not read poems and narratives as invocations for us to care for one another; why not see our texts as the place of our pain, as pain offered as possible understanding? Why not sing our verses to give care? Poems are the saving context for metaphors that poets will improve in time.

Note 1 This suggests an erotics of pain that has yet to be fully understood, though David Morris’s chapter on De Sade in The Culture of Pain has added to knowledge of the subject.

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Works cited Acorn, Milton. “I’ve Tasted My Blood,” “Poem With Fat Cats in the Background,” and “The Fights.” In a Springtime Instant. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2012, pp.35, 49, 17. Bartlett, Jennifer. “Preface.” Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011, pp.15–​17. Bartlett, Jennifer, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen, editors. Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011. Bérubé, Michael. The Secret Life of Stories. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Buchanan, Ian (ed.).“Poetics.” Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory Online. Toronto:  Oxford University Press, 2015. Chivers, Sally. “Survival of the Fittest: CanLit and Disability.” Oxford Handbook to Canadian Literature, edited by Cynthia Sugars. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Couser, G. Thomas. “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation.” The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd edition, edited by Lenard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2006, pp.399–​404. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso, 1995. Fearon, Emily. “High-​profile Canadian journalists pledge to raise money for ‘appropriation Prize.’” Toronto Star. 12 May 2017. www.thestar.com/​news/​gta/​2017/​05/​12/​high-​profile-​canadian-​journalists-​ pledge-​to-​raise-​money-​for-​appropriation-​prize.html. Habermas, Jürgen. On the Pragmatics of Communication. Ed. Maeve Cooke. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Hall, Alice. Literature and Disability. New York: Routledge, 2016. Honderich, Ted (ed.). “Intersubjectivity.” Oxford Companion to Philosophy. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Kuppers, Petra. “Towards a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol.3, no.3 (2009), pp.221–​40. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Useless Suffering.” Entre Nous: On Thinking-​of-​the-​Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp.91–​101. Moses, Daniel David, and Terry Goldie. “Magic Words/​Nakasuk.” An Anthology of Native Literature in English, 3rd edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2005. Nichol, bp. “Sum of the Parts.” The Alphabet Game:  A bpNichol Reader. Ed. Darren Werschler and Lori Emerson. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2007, pp.234–​35. Nowlan, Alden. “The Boil.” Alden Nowlan: Collected Poems, ed. Brian Bartlett. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2017. Osteen, Mark. “Autism and Representation: A Comprehensive Introduction.” Autism and Representation, ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 2007, pp.1–​48. Pastavas, Alison. “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain:  Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, no.8, vol.2, 2014, pp.203–​18. Piepzna-​Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. “Bad Road.” The Deaf Poets Society. www. deafpoetssociety.com/​leah-​ lakshmi-​piepzna-​samarasinha. Accessed 8 Sept. 2018. Ruffo, Armand Garnett. “Power.” At Geronimo’s Grave. Regina: Coteau Books, 2001. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schmaltz, Eric. “‘To Forget in a Body’:  Mosaical Consciousness and Materialist Avant-​Gardism in Bill Bisset and Milton Acorn’s unpublished I Want to Tell You Love.” Canadian Literature, vol. 222, 2014, pp.96–​112. Seibers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University Michigan Press, 2010. —​—​—​. “In the Name of Pain.” Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Shildrick, Margaret. Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality. New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Snyder, Sharon L. “Infinities of Forms: Disability Figures in Artistic Traditions.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Joe Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson. New York: MLA, 2002. Toner, Patrick. If I Could Turn and Meet Myself. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2000. Wente,Jesse.“An Emotional JesseWente on the‘RemarkableArrogance’of anAppropriation Prize.”CBC News Toronto. 15 May 2017. www.cbc.ca/​news/​canada/​toronto/​jesse-​wente-​appropriation-​prize-​1.4115293.

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19 DISABILITY IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY Johanna Emeney

Introduction This chapter will explore the work of contemporary poets who write autobiographically about disability,1 comparing their perspectives and approaches. This is poetry from the “lifeworld”2 of neurological, visual and auditory impairment. First and foremost, however, it is lyric poetry that universalises human experience, communicating our common psycho-​social and political concerns. First, I will analyse the poetry of two women whose work has been influenced by progressive impairments:  Lucia Perillo (1958–​2016) and Michele Leggott (1956–​). Both poets often take as their subject matter the bodily demands placed on them by degenerative conditions. Moreover, the trajectory of Perillo’s multiple sclerosis (diagnosed when she was 30) and Leggott’s retinitis pigmentosa (diagnosed when she was 29) may be traced through their poetry collections’ thematic emphases and motifs. Although some disability studies theorists have objected to a focus on impairment and “defective” embodiment, these foci “conced[ing] ground to the biological reductionism that [has] been orchestrated and sustained by doctors and other social care professionals for more than two centuries” (Thomas, Female Forms 120), others think it is none the less important to take into account subjective experiences of living with impairment. Indeed, many theorists have long been calling to “bring the body back in” (122). British feminist disability activist Liz Crow asserts that the body is as real a site of experience as any external one: “External disabling barriers may create social and economic disadvantage but our subjective experience of our bodies is also an integral part of our everyday reality” (58). Lucia Perillo began to allude to her illness in The Body Mutinies (1996), her second collection. While she is on the record as someone who has “never been interested in being a ‘disabled poet’ ”, Perillo nonetheless grew increasingly comfortable with sharing her views on the body as both functioning and non-​functioning organism during the course of her career (“Dear (Hypothetical) Reader”). Many of her poems are about personal experience, but some are from more of a remove, and regard the physical realities of others’ impairments, as well as disability’s social, economic and cultural aspects. Furthermore, a collection of essays published in 2007 addresses topics such as the curtailment of her life as naturalist once she could no longer walk unaided, and the difficulties of sex for people with impairments. In these essays, as in her poetry, Perillo’s tone is honest, often humorous, and appreciative of life’s irony. 224

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Michele Leggott, like Perillo, provides a first-​person account of disability in many of her poems, and engages with its everyday effects upon body and mind. In 1985, Leggott was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that has caused a gradual loss of sight to the point of blindness. Whilst her poems remain rich in visual imagery, its inclusion is reliant on memory and description from friends: “My poems are still full of images, but they are assisted images –​things told to me or that I remember…When I do that, the images in the poetry have the function of putting the world back in front me” (Raggatt). In looking at Leggott’s poetry over two decades, it is possible to perceive not only references to her growing impairment, but also evidence of the ways in which formal innovation has been catalysed by physical constraints. A poet who enjoys performance, Leggott has had to adapt her way of working onstage to accommodate the restrictions of her condition, but some of the modalities that she has needed to use in order to do so have opened the door to new ways of working with the structure and general style of her poems. Finally, the chapter will discuss Deaf3 poetics in its written form. I will analyse some poems from The Perseverance (2018) by Raymond Antrobus, focussing on how the poet uses language and structure to interrogate his identity as a British Jamaican Deaf man. In addition to this intersectional aspect of his work, I will also explore the way in which Antrobus has problematised the presentation of deafness in the western canon, using his own writing to critique and subvert that depiction. Like Leggott and Perillo, Antrobus is able to offer the reader a valuable personal account of impairment –​and one that is both a meditation on the subject of his d/​Deafness, and also a commentary on the socio-​political contexts of the UK and the US in which the Deaf and/​or biracial personae in the poems find themselves. In The Perseverance, Antrobus presents the reader with lyric poems which pose questions not only about Deaf and hearing cultures and how they might communicate more effectively, but also about how we all might communicate more effectively and more equitably in fraught times. Disability studies, with its nascence in activism and its emphasis on dismantling a historically constructed discourse of objectification and marginalisation, encourages those who were once narrativized to become the tellers of their own stories, and Antrobus’s collection exemplifies this impulse.

The Body Mutinies: the poetry of Lucia Perillo Lucia Perillo investigates the degradation of the human body with the same curiosity she dedicates to many of the wildlife studies in her poetry. She seems as interested in the human animal and its biology as she is fascinated by creatures such as the turtle, the cow and the white rat. Her work is also insistent on the fact of the body as the site of suffering and of art. Perillo, who majored in Wildlife Management at McGill University, worked as an animal damage control researcher at the Fish and Wildlife Service in Denver, the San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge and, later, Mount Rainier National Park. Her interest in poetry ran alongside these placements; she attended a poetry workshop at San Jose State University taught by nature poet Robert Hass, and completed a master’s degree in English at Syracuse University. One year before the publication of her first collection, Dangerous Life (1989), Perillo was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Although Perillo has expressed an antipathy to the term “disabled poet” (“Dear (Hypothetical) Reader”) she has also explained the way in which earlier concerns that were prominent in her writing faded into the background upon her diagnosis: I became less interested in women’s issues when my identity as a woman was subsumed by my identity as a person who was sick. …Then that identity overtook these earlier 225

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concerns because they paled. My earlier feminist concerns, my feelings of discrimination, were small potatoes compared to what I was up against subsequent to that. I acquired a new identity. Now, you know, I don’t even feel like a woman anymore. I don’t feel that’s my primary identity. It stopped being my concern. I felt that: Oh, I’m this other thing now. (“The Body Mutiny”) The Body Mutinies (1996) features many poems which deal with her condition, describing primarily what sociologist Carol Thomas refers to as “impairment effects” (135). Thomas formulated the idea of impairment effects in her 1999 publication, Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability. The phrase is meant to acknowledge the daily difficulties of living with impairment “without undermining the importance and centrality of disablism” (135).Thomas’s intention is that the impaired body be understood “as bio-​social in character” (135). She explains: Put at its simplest, impairment effects refer to those restrictions of bodily activity and behaviour that are directly attributable to bodily variations designated “impairments” rather than to those imposed upon people because they have designated impairments (disablism). (136) In the title poem of The Body Mutinies, Perillo critiques “medicine’s blunt instruments”  –​ “words and names” –​and how they “undid” her (6, 7) on the day she received her diagnosis. She remarks upon the industry that profits from the medicalisation of illness, spying “the dusty bedpans glint[ing] like coins” in the “surgical supply shop window” (14, 13). In “Retablo with Multiple Sclerosis and Saints” (31–​34), she berates the “hospitals where the doctors are such screw-​ups /​even death gets botched” (77–​78). For the majority of that second poem, though, her focus is upon “impairment effects”. In “Retablo with Multiple Sclerosis and Saints” (31–​34), written for her close friend,Vivian Kendall, who also had multiple sclerosis, she describes a devotional painting, which, it seems, Vivian is working on. It is a retablo of the style that Frida Kahlo collected and famously transformed, often inverting the traditions of the devotional votives to convey her own ideas regarding suffering, divinity and redemption. In the poem, we are told that Vivian’s painting features various religious ­figures –​“Saint Joseph for the good death. /​Camillus for protection against sickness of the feet” (1–​2) – and an image of the artist herself, her “face […] jowled like a yam and floating /​where a black cloud threatens to digest [her] legs” (16–​17). The speaker admits: Each night I try to memorise the fit of my own legs In case my waking finds them shadowy and numb; I don’t want any limb to think I am ungrateful For swimming lengths of the ice-​blue pool. Or for the soup spoon’s lifting, or for the swallowing… (21–​25) The imagery of impairment shifts disturbingly in the last line as the speaker’s gratitude is drawn to the things that may well be taken away from her as her disease progresses: using her hand to feed herself and being able to swallow. The terror of life itself growing smaller in terms of the impairment effects of her illness is what concerns her.This is emphasised when she brings Kahlo directly into the poem, and denounces a critic who called the “two-​hundred replications of her face /​a self-​indulgence” (64) and proposed rhetorically, “doesn’t everybody live with some 226

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degree //​of pain?” (65–​66). The speaker exclaims to her friend, “christ, Viv: by the end she only had one fucking leg! –​/​how was she supposed to paint the world if she couldn’t /​even stagger round the block?” (68–​70).There is a rage in her question –​also rhetorical –​that decries any charge of solipsism directed towards Frida Kahlo’s art. The question also holds within it an implied fear of losing creativity to the body’s mutinies. If Kahlo was forced to paint herself over and over again because her world became so interior, what might become of the speaker? In another poem from The Body Mutinies called “Kilned” (38), Perillo considers what it is to make art from “catastrophe” (25). She uses as the poem’s central figure the artist Stephen Lang, who makes sculptures from molten lava. The poem begins with an italicised epigraph, which quotes Lang: “I was trying somehow to keep my works /​true to their nature, to allow the crudeness /​to be their beauty.”This is the emotional centre of the poem: the idea that art can be made from that which is painful –​that which is potentially “grotesque” (18), potentially fatal.Yet that which is also true. It is the same idea as that which lies at the heart of “Retablo with Multiple Sclerosis and Saints”: surely suffering is a worthy subject for art –​for poetry. The first part of “Kilned” describes the times when the speaker is put in mind of Lang, who works close to the volcano’s fire, and who, “[w]‌hen he catches fire […] will roll in a patch of moss /​then simply rise and carry on” (14–​15): These days when blood refuses to be talked into the stone, when the legs twitch like hounds under the sheets and the eyes are troubled by a drifting fleck –​ (1–​3) She appears to see in the sculptor’s intention and process a mirror both of her own gathering together of body and mind in the face of distracting corporeal disobediences, and of her writing about illness: First he tries to see what this catastrophe is saying. Then, with a trowel in his sweaty, broiling hand, he works to sculpt it into something human. (25–​27) “[T]‌o sculpt it into something human” is a powerful phrase, and some disability studies scholars would perhaps take issue with the implication that there is something subhuman about the body described in stanza one for which the molten rock, brought under control by the sculptor in the last three lines, is a correlative. By connection, in a 2007 review of Perillo’s essay collection, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature (2007), Laurie Clements Lambeth explains what she views as the book’s problematic presentation of embodiment and illness: The book’s difficulty lies in the uneasy balance between the edgy, angry, overtly dramatic and therefore sentimentally portrayed self, and the beautifully subdued and moving consolation made in connections between her body and nature. It is indeed fiercely honest, but it feels edited to downplay the lyric and turn up the volume on what might be seen by disability scholars as re-​inscribing ableist conventions of the illness narrative, privileging the body that once was. (Disability Studies Quarterly) Perillo, reflecting on her poetry, has described it as “tottering on the edge of the precipice of sentimentality” (“An Interview with Lucia Perillo” 22), but she has added, with specific 227

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reference to the poem, “Shrike Tree”, “that it may be all right to err on the mushy side of things once in a while, especially because we have such a cultural proscription about what we call self-​pity…I also should say that I’m interested in the idea of self-​pity, what it is specifically and why it is forbidden” (22). Lennard J. Davis explains that “by narrativizing an impairment, one tends to sentimentalize it and link it to the bourgeois sensibility of individualism and the drama of an individual story” (3–​4). This focus on the individual, of course, ignores causal factors of disability that are environmental, cultural and socio-​political. Theorists who share Davis’s view also perceive it to be extremely difficult for any first-​person account of impairment to avoid reinforcing conventional representations of disabled characters as heroic, horrifying or heart-​breaking. Furthermore, as Hughes (2009) posits: “Frailty offends, reminding the ‘clean and proper body’ of the ghosts of the ageing, suffering and affliction that represent its most profound fears” (401). “Shrike Tree”, published in Perillo’s 2007 collection, Luck is Luck, features the disturbing but fascinating image of a tree in which hook-​beaked birds hang their prey –​such as smaller birds, shrews, toads, etc. –​in order to desiccate them or leave them to be stripped of their poisonous skins before consumption. This vehicle, like the image of Lang in “Kilned”, sculpting his pieces from molten lava, is utilised to convey Perillo’s thoughts regarding embodiment: Some of the dead ones hung at eye level while some burned holes in the sky overhead. At least it is honest, the body apparent and not rotting in the dirt. (“Shrike Tree” 5–​9) Perillo takes the perspective in this stanza of observer; there is something of the roaming naturalist of her earlier poems, but there is also an empathy with the impaled creatures who are admired for their (albeit involuntary) dissolution in full sight. Once again, her poetry suggests a connection between honesty and suffering. The body laid bare is, for Perillo, a marvellous confrontation. It is like a natural work of art, too, “hung at eye level”, for the speaker to wonder at. The last part of the poem complicates the narrative perspective, intertwining the observer and subject by degrees. To achieve this, Perillo first employs a devastating metaphor after the very plain phrasing of “back when I could walk”, the first assertion of her impairment: They hang there, desiccating by the trail where walked back when I could walk, before life pinned me on its thorn. (24–​26) Now, both the speaker and the shrike’s prey share the same ineluctable fate. Rather than bemoan the pathos of such suffering, however, Perillo asks the reader to contemplate the “glamour” (30) associated with such a rare and spectacular end in the poem’s final lines: Because imagine the luck! –​: to be plucked from the air, to be drenched and dried in the sun’s bright voltage? well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless. With a chunk of sky in each eye socket. And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl. (33–​37) 228

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Perillo closes this poem with an amalgam of registers designed to be persuasive in various ways. In close proximity are the discursive, the exclamatory, the vernacular and the lyrical as Perillo asks, why shouldn’t one draw attention to those parts of life that are “hard luck” (35)? Why shouldn’t one direct people’s attention towards tragic glamour? Why shouldn’t the suffering body be the subject of the unflinching gaze? In her own words: “Maybe I was trying to see if a certain amount of rigor of exposition could render self-​pity palatable” (“An Interview with Lucia Perillo” 22). Perillo’s presentation of disability in terms of personal tragedy in poems like “Shrike Tree” clearly goes against a social model of disability.Vic Finkelstein, for example, argues that “you see disability fundamentally as a personal tragedy or you see it as a form of social oppression” (4). Perillo’s perspective may well be viewed as one that hearkens back to the “individual model” of disability (Oliver, Sapey and Thomas 12). For those who espouse the social model, “disability should be understood not as a corporeal deficit but in terms of the ways in which social structure excludes and oppresses disabled people” (Hughes 59). To read just one or two volumes of Perillo’s poetry, though, is to understand that she is well aware of the social barriers facing those who are disabled, the fraught issues surrounding the medicalisation of illness, the difference between age-​related impairment and that which a person is born with or which develops at mid-​life. She has a keen apprehension of the stark differences between what is possible for those who are ill and have money and family, and what it is like for those who have neither. In fact, to read just one poem like “Elephant” (36–​37) from The Body Mutinies, wherein she observes first, a disabled writer4 giving a reading from his latest work and then, as she leaves the event, a wheelchair-​bound homeless man bedding down in a shop doorway, is to perceive her holistic understanding of disability and impairment. Although Perillo, who died on 16 October 2016, at the age of 58, claimed “never [to have] been interested in being a ‘disabled poet’ ” (“Dear (Hypothetical) Reader”), her oeuvre speaks directly about “what the body can continue in spite of ” (“Elephant” 9) and what it is to desire freedom from the “meat cage” when continuing becomes unremittingly difficult (“Virtue Is the Best Helmet” 3). In an interview with Sophie Grimes of Publishers Weekly given in the last year of her life, Perillo explained why the malfunctioning, deteriorating body had become a key subject in her work: “It’s aesthetically beautiful, really, the process of decay, and biologically quite complex.” She added, “I suppose the reason I’m drawn to it has to do with my own conditions of living.” Perillo was determined to transform those conditions of living into poetry, and to have people regard that transformation with fascination and wonder. The epigraph to The Body Mutinies reads: Why be given a body if you have to keep it Shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle –​Katherine Mansfield

Vanishing Points: the poetry of Michele Leggott Michele Leggott’s poetry, like that of Perillo, allows the reader to understand something of the increasing effects of impairment on her daily life  –​and on her “lifeworld”, as Mishler would term it. On the back cover of As Far as I can See (1999), for example, Leggott is explicit about her purpose: “Much of what is written here is an effort to remember seeing, something to put against the dark while I  searched for ways of understanding where it has put me.” This collection, published 14 years after the diagnosis of her condition, brings us directly into a world that has changed dramatically because of decreasing vision –​a world that feels 229

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relentlessly disorienting. At this juncture, the symptoms which began as episodes of night blindness and pericentral sight disturbances have become much worse:  “When I  couldn’t thread a needle, when I could no longer see the faces of my children or trim their nails, when the colour of money disappeared (and I bare-​headed in the midday sun) then falling began and I cried out against it” (“a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they with one another”  8–​11). In a similar way to Perillo, Leggott does not edit the fear –​nor is her work without what G. Thomas Couser would describe as “the rhetoric of nostalgia…representing disability essentially as loss” (111): If touch is a torch and the difference still you, can it matter so very much if I do not see your face? I hold you, I kiss you. How can I go on without you? The price of the gate is too high, it tears me apart and I am afraid. (“Small Stories from Two Decades”) Yet, this evocation of loss seems to be an integral part of the experience being shared with the reader; it is the emotional response to impairment. For Leggott, the logical response to impairment, which runs alongside the grief, is reinvention. By the time Leggott launched her ninth collection, Vanishing Points, in October 2017, her sight had diminished to mere “pinpoints of light” (Contact Workshop). For the 61-​year-​old poet, this collection marked a turning point in her writing –​one signalled by the epigraph of the section titled “Self-​Portrait:  Still Life. A  Family Story”:  “I made a decision. I  said to myself: since I have lost the beloved world of appearances, I must create something else. –​Jorge Luis Borges” (35). From this point on, the poems are presented in a prose-​like format (with long, unbroken “paragraphs” with many minor sentences but standard punctuation) as opposed to what had become Leggott’s characteristic style, demonstrated in earlier collections such as As Far as I can See (1999) and Milk & Honey (2005) which incorporated such elements as line-​breaks, an absence of punctuation and standardised intralinear blank spaces (four-​space ellipses). The recent changes in format and style have been spurred by physical and technological catalysts. Leggott’s near-​total blindness, coupled with the inability of audio-​technology to “read” her work back to her faithfully, recognising its line-​breaks, intentionally omitted punctuation and characteristic blank spaces, has nudged her towards prose-​poetry and regular punctuation. As Michael Davidson argues with reference to American poet Larry Eigner, whose cerebral palsy, some critics posit, influenced his poetry’s diction and form, there is a “danger” of misjudging innovation under such circumstances as “a compensatory response for physical limits rather than a critical engagement with them” (122). It is important to note that everything about the evolution of Leggott’s poetry suggests critical engagement. She is an innovator, an amalgamator and an appropriator, both in her poetic process and in the performative aspects of her work. A poet who perceives performance as an imperative part of her poetic practice, Leggott, with the help of Tim Page, a digital media specialist at Auckland University, started to experiment with various technologies to enable her to continue to read her work aloud when her sight would no longer accommodate standard –​or greatly enlarged –​print. Half-​way through 2012, Leggott finally turned off the visuals when performing her poetry to an audience.While she still composes her poems using a computer keyboard, she now recites her poetry utilising an iPod and ear-​piece. GPS’s “Karen”, the Australian-​accented voice, reads the poem to Leggott, a line or two in advance of her delivery. 230

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Significantly, a number of poems which Leggott uses frequently in performance have been edited down considerably from the print-​published versions  –​for example, quite a few of the poems in As Far as I can See (1999) and Heartland (2014). The cuts that have been made have revitalised the works and surprised Leggott by becoming her preferred versions (Contact Workshop). Another way in which Leggott’s poetry has changed over time is that her modernist sensibility –​the acquisitiveness, the desire to have her poems feature many voices from many times and places –​has developed further. Now, those of her poems which require deeply visual elements have collaborators. Often, these are literary friends who will describe the required element –​for example, a painting or sketch –​and then Leggott will not only use the mental imagery their descriptions conjure for her, but some of their words and phrases as well. In that way, there is a double transformation and assimilation at work. For the purposes of comparison across the years, we can look first at a work from 1994, and then one from 2017. In 1993, the retinitis was discovered to have infiltrated the poet’s central vision. In 1994, however, Leggott was still reading print, although she was suffering some visual disturbances. In DIA (1994), Leggott’s third collection, there is a sonnet sequence titled “Blue Irises” (8–​39), thirty poems investigating the source and sustenance of female power. Throughout the series of poems, archival material features heavily –​lines appropriated from the classical world, from the work of earlier and contemporary poets –​and incorporated into Leggott’s own poetry. The past is brought forward, melded with the present. The result is many women’s voices, an assemblage that is as polemical as it is dynamic. To give an example, “Sonnet 16” from “Blue Irises” contains lines from the work of Eileen Duggan (“A New Zealand Christmas”), Bernadette Hall (“Constructing a Landscape”) and Robyn Hyde (“China is floating past me”).These lines are not signposted by footnotes; they are not glossed anywhere in the text or the collection as a whole; the words of these other women poets are simply drawn into chorus with Leggott’s own (Newman 118). 16 Coming home like a derelict Egyptian, changing Worlds, a baby delivered in a jacaranda mist just Like mine The trees are quiet now, the baby grown And sorrow gone from the place it lay down in Long before I was born What are we going to do About that moon in the ngaio tree beating like A fontanelle? Can we go on reading the summer Constellations that do not pretend to be literature? Cicadas Avocados But where’s that frightening dog sorrow? Lord butterfly on lord hibiscus spray are we through crying and the heart’s big conversation with pain? Two sons, two sons, and crowning isn’t a light word any more than a light kiss resembles a dark one Which you are (25) Lines 5–​7 are an amalgamation of Hall and Duggan; line 10 comes from Hyde. No doubt, there are other instances of “reticulation” (Leggott, Qtd in Newman 124), but these serve to illustrate the many-​voicedness of the work –​in this example, it echoes back through the years of New Zealand poetry by women. In the 2017 collection Vanishing Points, the section titled “Emily and her Sisters” contains small character studies of artist Emily Cumming Harris (1837–​1925) and her siblings. These 231

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were constructed by combining descriptions of five botanical sketches (by Harris) written by New Zealand women with extracts from archival material such as Emily’s letters and diaries. The result is a series of poems which tells the story of the sisters from the point of view of Emily, yet refracted twice: once through the person who described the image and once more through Leggott who drew together the archival material and who combined it with selected parts from each writer-​colleague’s description of the sketch. Gone are the four blank spaces; gone are the line-​breaks, but the rhythm and chimes remain. Perhaps most importantly, the multi-​layered quality of the work remains –​and continues to evolve. In the example which follows, it is possible to see, in just a few lines, the texture made possible by the technique of assemblage. It is as though Frances is created all at once –​in chorus, in collage: frances She is my rebel soul, my other self, the one who draws me out and folds me away. She is a brush tipped with paint, a Conté crayon poised above white paper. She is running after Frank Standish, wearing out her heart on him, waterscape, landscape, natural rock archway destroyed by the quarry opened up for breakwater construction and at last there was safe harbour for landing in. Frances, fourth daughter, my sister across the sea when I despaired of ever coming home. (1–​8) It is also possible to trace Leggott’s evolving style through just one poem: “Olive” appears in different forms online (in Otoliths journal, in Heartland print book and Heartland eBook (2014)). The version I  will quote from is the eBook, which is the latest version. “Olive” tells of the arrival of Leggott’s guide dog. Olive’s journey to Leggott’s home in Auckland was delayed by the explosion of the Pike River Mine. When the mine exploded on 19 October 2010, 29 men were killed, their bodies trapped inside. One-​third of the way through the poem, Leggott melds the two situations, personal and national: a robotic camera has been sent into the mine and there is little hope; the speaker takes the dog out on a first walk. A different type of trepidation suffuses both situations. The lack of punctuation and run-​on lines add merge the two events, as do the images of seeing and breathing: when the drill breaks through the images show that nobody reached the oxygen refuge when they find a cap lamp still flickering in the camera’s eye four and a half days and a kilometre in we go out for the first time just around the block only to hear there’s been another explosion dog I hold my breath as you take us into the world I can’t see (31–​39) The two strands are further united in the penultimate stanza by a single “path” (43) that is described as running “between light and darkness pain and rage /​care and the undoing of everything we cared for” (44–​45). It is a path shared by all of the people who await news of the miners who are now “entombed” (41) because the mine has been sealed to stop further 232

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explosions. People are “threading” (43) this path, suggesting that they are static, waiting, as if stitched into material. Yet, in the final stanza, movement is created by the dog. Amazed, the speaker wonders, “my dog how can you move with such grace /​through these days pulling sea and sky along /​with you under the red-​flowering trees” (46–​48). The guide dog is leading her as if hauling the whole world onwards: this is not “peace /​but motion” (49–​50). The inference appears to be that the dog is keeping her going, keeping her moving, in this new, unaccustomed way, just as the small community of Pike River, and the nation as a whole, can only continue moving forward in this circumstance, trying to carry on, together: …ten thousand people looking up the valley to a dip in the ranges while someone sings You’ll Never Walk Alone not peace but motion what is her name they ask me and I say she has been here since the start her name is Olive (50–​54) In “Olive” (her name meaning “life”), we are reading about the emotions associated with the transition from independence to relying on a guide dog. We come to understand the difference Olive herself makes to this transition, and how the first steps into this relationship are both frightening and revivifying. However, the poem is political, as well as personal:  it is a poem about a disaster that affected individuals, families –​a whole nation. The personal and the political are inextricable, and the poem’s emotional power relies on the emphasis Leggott places upon resilience, trust and interdependence.

The Perseverance: the poetry of Raymond Antrobus Raymond Antrobus explores the personal and political implications of d/​Deafness in The Perseverance (2018). The personae of the poems are usually d/​Deaf voices, and often they tell Antrobus’s own story in the first person, allowing the reader a powerful insight into his experience from childhood to adulthood. Many of the poems convey a deep sense of frustration associated with Antrobus’s early feelings of non-​acceptance by a predominantly hearing society. “Dear Hearing World”, modelled on Danez Smith’s polemical “dear white America” (Poetry Foundation), rails against the discrimination Antrobus sees in an education system geared towards hearing culture: I tried, hearing people, I tried to love you, but you laughed at my deaf grammar. I used commas not full stops because everything I said kept running away. I mulled over long paragraphs because I didn’t know what a natural break sounded like, you erased what could have always been poetry ( 14–​19) Antrobus endured a difficult school career. Until the age of six, when his deafness was finally diagnosed, it was “assumed that [he] was dyslexic and introverted” (“Echo: A Deaf Sequence”); his reports suggested “slowness” (“Echo: A Deaf Sequence”). A minor error of speech –​one of the missed signs of young Antrobus’s deafness –​features in “Echo” (13–​18), a poem divided into BSL numbered sections to . In poem , an old cassette labelled “Raymond Speaking” is replayed for the reader:

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…my two-​year-​old voice chanting my name, Antrob, and Dad’s laughter crackling in the background, not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus” and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids. Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness –​ Antrob, Antrob, Antrob. (“Echo”   7–​12) This poem is complicated by the fact that its context is the death of the poet’s father, whose laughter “crackl[es] in the background” (8). The tape recording is found while the speaker “clear[s]‌out [his] dead father’s flat.” Like Perillo and Leggott, Antrobus does not deal solely in the poetry of impairment and its psycho-​social resonances. The speaker’s contemplation of the echoing “space of deafness” in the last lines is also an indication of his loss and grief. These are lyric poems which transcend the personal and deal in universal touchstones of experience: the loss of a parent being just one example. The idea of “space” or something “missing” is continued in the fifth poem in the “Echo” sequence, which depicts one of the diagnostic tests he underwent as a child: …a doctor gave me a handful of Lego and said to put a brick on the table every time I heard a sound. After the test I still held enough bricks in my hand to build a house and call it my sanctuary (“Echo”    1–​7) Here, the silence is a thing to hold onto and to seek refuge in. By contrast, the more polemical poems in the collection draw attention to the fact that the “sanctuary” (“Echo” 7) transforms to a place of danger in his years as an adolescent and an adult. Deafness becomes its own threat to safety. For example, in “Miami Airport” (76–​78), the voice of a security guard harangues a deaf, mixed-​race man with questions that slide all over the page –​left, right, centre, their slipperiness in the white space suggesting the way in which the addressee must concentrate to comprehend them:       Why didn’t you answer me back there? you know how loud these things are on my waist? you don’t look deaf?       can you prove it?                   do you know sign language? I.D?       why didn’t I see anyone that looked like you             when I was in England? (“Miami Airport” 1–​8) On his website, Antrobus claims that he has had this type of experience many times: “I rarely get through an airport without the ‘random search’ or being escorted into a backroom for questioning”. The double-​vulnerability of being Jamaican British and d/​Deaf is a concern that the collection raises more than once, and in so doing places racism and audism side by side for the reader’s apprehension. In “Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris” (54–​55), the potential for violence prickling under the surface of “Miami Airport” is realised. The poem’s occasion is the fatal shooting of a 234

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29-​year-​old deaf and speech-​impaired man by a Carolina State trooper who pulled him over for speeding. The Evening Standard reports that the officer said he “opened fire because Mr Harris was moving towards him and not responding to his commands” (Dunne). Witnesses claimed that “the victim, who died at the scene, had been using sign language towards the officer” and that he was shot “almost immediately” after getting out of his car. “Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris” works to two crescendos. The first is the shooting and the second is the speaker’s realisation of his own vulnerability. Like Perillo in “Shrike Tree” and Legott in “Olive”, Antrobus weaves the two subjects together during the course of this poem.The result is a piece that successfully universalises the experience of two d/​Deaf men and raises awareness of an important political and social issue. The opening lines starkly create the scenario: “When Daniel Harris stepped out of his car /​the policeman was waiting. Gun raised” (1–​2). Then a faux digression into a lesson on sign language’s tenses segues quickly into the immediacy of the pointed gun at lines 6–​7. A sudden shift from “I” to “you” places the reader in Daniel’s position, face to face with a gun: I use the past tense though this is irrelevant in Daniel’s language, which is sign. Sign has no future or past; it is a present language. You are never more present than when a gun is pointed at you… (3–​7) The critical point, the first climax to which Antrobus has been building, is that what the officer saw was “Daniel’s language” (4). Daniel waved his hands, making the sign for No!, and the officer shot him. A terrible mistake of communication –​an inability by the officer to read Daniel’s meaning (or the officer’s refusal to try and intuit his meaning) –​ended in Daniel’s death. The turning point of the poem comes next; the scene changes to the “news” (12) reaching the speaker on his phone as he sits in a Brooklyn café. His friend looks through the comments section of the paper and reads “Black Lives Matter” (15) just as an armed policewoman enters the café. A question suddenly runs through the speaker’s mind, as he thinks about the precariousness of their language –​a language made by hands moving: Now what could we sign or say out loud when the last word I learned in ASL was alive? Alive –​both thumbs pointing at your lower abdominal, index fingers pointing up like two guns in the sky. (16–​19) There is an implication by means of the juxtaposed “news” (12) on the phone and “Black Lives Matter” (16) in the comments section, that we can view the plight of Daniel Harris as similar to that of the many Black Americans who have lost their lives in needless altercations with US police. We are invited to see these fatal confrontations as motivated by bias and a fundamental failure of communication and understanding. The tragic ease of this misapprehension is exemplified in the final lines of the poem (17–​20), which suggest that the very sign that communicates the life of the speaker and his friend could, by its resemblance to a threatening gesture, “index fingers pointing up; like two guns in the sky” (20), endanger them in the presence of a police officer in the café wearing two holstered guns. Antrobus ends his poem with the ASL word:  “Alive”  –​the fingers and thumbs clearly making the “two guns” of the title and the poem’s last line. Not only does the inclusion of this sign in print draw the reader’s attention to the possibility of misreading the meaning, timbre 235

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and intention of a word or phrase in sign language, in context, it highlights the need for law enforcement and society as a whole to be educated with regard to those who use exclusively what is, in most countries, the third or fourth national language. Antrobus is keen to assert the legitimacy of BSL, and to do so in a way that includes the reader who is not sign-​literate. Throughout The Perserverance, as in Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, signs communicate in one more way the message that sign language (suppressed in America 1880–​1960 and in England from 1880–​1974) is a valid, complex and nuanced system. Also of orthographic interest in Antrobus’s collection is the inking-​out of Ted Hughes’s “Deaf School” (39–​40). The Perserverance (which won the 2019 Ted Hughes Award) features an entirely redacted version of “Deaf School” in which the Hughes uses the word “simple” five times to describe the deaf students, and makes sweeping statements such as “They lacked a dimension” (4). They are also depicted in bestial terms: “monkey nimble” (1), having faces like those “of little animals” (3), appearing as “small night lemurs caught in the flashlight” (3). Antrobus’s “After Reading ‘Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River” (41–​42) depicts a very “simple” (5) Hughes attempting to describe the titular river –​such a large body of water, with so much history –​and getting it all, all wrong. In writing back to Hughes’s poem, Antrobus hijacks some of the original language, and in so doing aligns with Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of autoethnographic writing wherein “colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms” (Qtd in Couser 116).The words in italics are adapted from Hughes’s original poem, and we are to assume that the speaker’s voice is that of Antrobus: No one wise calls the river unaware or simple pools; no one wise says it lacks a dimension, no one wise says its body is removed from the vibration of air.  (1–​3) In an interview with Theresa Awonuga, Antrobus explains his reasons for the blackout of Hughes’s poem: Redacting the text in the Ted Hughes “Deaf School” poem was a cathartic choice, because when I read that poem my response was intense anger…[T]‌o be able to find a way into my poem it had to begin with crossing out the old one. In another interview, with Emily Berry, Antrobus explains the decision to write his own poem in response to Hughes’s portrayal of the deaf children: It’s such a way to use your power as a poet, to frame, or to in a way to assault, people you don’t understand. And I think [sighs] there are so many things in literature, in our canon, in our story, in our history of language, that I think should be rethought, or challenged. In Antrobus’s poem, “Ted” is woven into a narrative of colonisation: Ted lived through his eyes. But eye the colossal currents from the bridge. Eye riverboats ghosting a geography of fog. Mississippi means Big River, named by French colonisers.

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The natives laughed at their arrogant maps, conquering wind and marking mist. (“After Reading ‘Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River” 5–​13) Like a thoughtless and hubristic coloniser, all Hughes managed to do in his poem was attempt to give names and descriptions to a place and people that were impossible to comprehend from his vantage point. Antrobus’s “Ted” is a man in a wetsuit with “misty goggles” on (15) who “Couldn’t see a thing” (15). Antrobus’s poem tells us that ultimately, these outdated ways of looking will be forgotten, swallowed in time by their very subjects: “No one heard him; the river drowned him out” (17).

Conclusion Of the three poets, it is clear that Antrobus is the one who writes from a standpoint of activism. He is a person who came late to Deaf culture, discovering its language’s richness and promise as an adult. As a teacher and mentor of young Deaf people, he is passionate about propagating a Deaf education and culture that he was not party to as a child. Just as he writes back to colonialist discourses as a Jamaican British poet, he redresses reductive, paternalistic discourses regarding deafness, using many of the techniques of spoken word together with complex traditional forms. Perillo often had a troubled relationship with “this new identity as an afflicted person”; identifying herself as a disabled poet was caught up with notions of being “typecast” and a dread of receiving undeserved recognition for being a minority (“The Body Mutiny”). However, in her published work, the raw and intensely curious manner in which she studies the human body as it fails shows her perspective: that impaired embodiment is worthy of art, worthy of looking at. Her way of depicting it, with great empathy for others and self-​compassion, also demonstrates a universalist understanding of human responsibility. Leggott’s collections range across many topics, but the motifs of eyes and sight, light and darkness can always be found within them. She is a poet whose developing impairment is part of her poetry on the page and in performance.The reader is often given access to key moments in the personal journey of her blindness –​as we have seen in “Olive”:                   …angels look out of the eyes of this dog who is here because I am blind and the world is huge with possibility we walk her in a raw wind not knowing we shouldn’t a mistake that costs but is not the end of the world (11–​15) This willingness to lay bare the lifeworld, together with her modernist acquisitiveness, her technique of assemblage and her ability to work with assistive technologies, taking inspiration from them in terms of her work’s style and structure, make Leggott a very fine example of modernist confessional poetics, collaboration and innovation. Perillo, Leggott and Antrobus have in common an ability to write autobiographical poetry about impairment, which is candid, unapologetic and wise. Although the three poets may invite criticism by some disability studies theorists for their occasional assertions of pre-​diagnosis nostalgia (Couser 111) or their presentation of disability’s “destructive…confining” (Couser 117) aspects,

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what they achieve is powerful self-​representation coupled with their poetry’s transcendence of the purely personal. The universality of their work allows the reader to connect with a world that is unfamiliar and familiar at once and, in many ways, to experience something of what may be to come –​for, as Hughes writes, “impairment is the fate of each and every one of us and, therefore, it is important to recognise that able bodied status is essentially temporary” (401).

Notes 1 Like a number of people writing on the topic of disability poetics or disability in general, I am uncomfortable with the nomenclature: “disability” –​its insinuation of a “lack of ” ability does not represent the members of the community about which I am writing. 2 In The Discourse of Medicine: Dialectics of Medical Interviews (1984) Elliot Mishler applied German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action (1984) to the medical interview, using the term “lifeworld” to signify the everyday psychosocial life of the patient –​his or her family life, job, social and economic status –​as opposed to the medical realities of his or her condition. 3 By using a capital D, I am suggesting those people who identify themselves as part of the Deaf community and Deaf culture. When a small d is used, it usually denotes only the aspect of hearing loss. 4 This writer was Raymond Carver, suffering from lung cancer.

Works cited Antrobus, Raymond. “After Reading ‘Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River”. The Perseverance. Penned in the Margins, 2018, pp.41–​42. —​—​—​. “Dear Hearing World”. The Perseverance. Penned in the Margins, 2018, pp.34–​36. —​—​—​. “Echo”. The Perseverance. Penned in the Margins, 2018, pp.13–​18. —​—​—​. “Echo:  A Deaf Sequence”. Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/​harriet/​2017/​03/​ echo-​a-​deaf-​sequence. Accessed 20 Oct. 2019. —​ —​ —​ . Interview with Emily Berry. The Poetry Society Podcast. https://​poetrysociety.org.uk/​ wp-​content/​uploads/​2018/​06/​18-​podcast-​Raymond-​Antrobus-​transcript.docx. Accessed 20 Oct. 2019. —​ —​ —​ . Interview with Theresa Awonuga. “In Conversation with Raymond Antrobus”. FourHubs, FourHubs, 2 Oct. 2018, www.fourhubs.com/​poetry-​1/​2018/​10/​2/​in-​conversation-​with-​raymond-​ antrobus. Accessed 18 May 2019. —​—​—​. “Miami Airport”. The Perseverance. Penned in the Margins, 2018, pp.76–​78. —​—​—​.“Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris”. The Perseverance. Penned in the Margins, 2018, pp.54–​55. Couser, G.Thomas. “Signifying Bodies: Life Writing and Disability Studies”. Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, et al. The Modern Language Association of America, 2002, pp.109–​117. Crow, Liz. “Including All of our Lives:  Renewing the Social Model of Disability”. Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability, edited by Colin Barnes and G. Mercer, Disability Press, 1996, pp.55–​72. http://​pf7d7vi404s1dxh27mla5569.wpengine.netdna-​cdn.com/​files/​library/​Crow-​exploring-​the-​ divide-​ch4.pdf. “ ‘Deaf School’ by Ted Hughes” (redacted). www.raymondantrobus.com/​essays. Accessed 17 May 2019. Davidson, Michael. Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. University of Michigan Press, 2011. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body.Verso,  1995. Duggan, Eileen. “A New Zealand Christmas”. NZ Electronic Text Collection, http://​nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/​ tm/​scholarly/​tei-​PopKowh-​t1-​body-​d1.html. Accessed 12 Oct. 2017. Dunne, John. “US Police Officer ‘Killed Deaf Man While He Used Sign Language’”. Evening Standard, 24 Aug. 2016, www.standard.co.uk/​news/​world/​us-​police-​officer-​killed-​deaf-​man-​daniel-​harris-​while-​ he-​used-​sign-​language-​a3328166.html. Accessed 16 May 2019. Finkelstein, Vic. 2001. “A Personal Journey into Disability Politics”. First presented at Leeds University Centre for Disability Studies, 2001. The Disability Studies Archive UK, Centre For Disability Studies, University of Leeds. www.independentliving.org/​docs3/​finkelstein01a.pdf. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.

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Disability in contemporary poetry Hall, Bernadette. “Constructing a Landscape”. NZ Electronic Poetry Centre. www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/​ authors/​hall/​constructing.asp. Accessed 12 October 2017. Hughes, Bill. “Disability and the Body”. Disability Studies Today, edited by Colin Barnes, et al., Polity Press, 2002, pp.58–​76. —​—​—​. “Wounded/​Monstrous/​Abject: A Critique of the Disabled Body in the Sociological Imaginary”. Disability & Society,Vol. 24, No. 4, pp.399–​410. Hughes,Ted. “Deaf School”. Collected Poems of Ted Hughes. Edited by Paul Keegan, Faber & Faber, 2012. eBook Collection (OverDrive). Hyde, Robyn. “China is floating past me”. NZ Electronic Poetry Centre. www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/​ authors/​hyde/​china.asp#china. Accessed 12 Oct. 2017. Lambeth, Laurie Clements. “Review of I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature by Lucia Perillo”. Disability Studies Quarterly,Vol. 27, No.4, www.dsq-​sds.org/​article/​view/​61/​ 61. Accessed 4 Oct. 2017. Lee, Phil. “Shooting for the Moon: Politics and Disability at the Beginning of the Twenty-​First Century”, Disability Studies Today., edited by Colin Barnes, et al., Polity, 2002, pp.139–​161. Leggott, Michele. As Far as I Can See. Auckland University Press, 1999. eBook OverDrive. —​—​—​. “Blue Irises”. Dia. Auckland University Press, 1994, pp.8–​39. —​—​—​. Contact Workshop, 139.750: Contemporary New Zealand Writers in an International Context, 3 September 2017, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. Reading and Discussion. —​—​—​. “Olive”. Heartland. Auckland University Press, 2014. eBook OverDrive. —​—​—​. “Olive”. Otoliths. https://​the-​otolith.blogspot.co.nz/​2011/​03/​michele-​leggott-​olive.html. Accessed 16 Oct. 2017. —​—​—​. “Small Stories from Two Decades”. Transcript from a performance. 19 Nov. 2014, https://​ nzpoetryshelf.com/​2014/​11/​19/​michele-​leggotts-​small-​stories-​from-​two-​decades-​performed-​at-​ the-​devonport-​arts-​festival-​a-​video-​link-​and-​transcript/​. Accessed 24 Oct. 2019. —​—​—​. Vanishing Points. Auckland University Press, 2017. —​—​—​. “a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they with one another.” As Far as I Can See. Auckland University Press, 1999. eBook OverDrive. Mishler, Elliot George. The Discourse of Medicine. Ablex Pub. Corp, 1984. Newman, Janet. “Listening Harder:  Reticulating Poetic Tradition in Michele Leggott’s ‘Blue Irises’”. Journal of New Zealand Literature Essay Prize. https://​jnzl.ac.nz/​jnzl-​essay-​prize/​. Accessed 10 Oct. 2017. Oliver, Mike. “The Individual and Social Models of Disability.” The Disability Studies Archive UK, Centre for Disability Studies, University of Leeds. https://​disability-​studies.leeds.ac.uk/​wp-​content/​uploads/​ sites/​40/​library/​Oliver-​in-​soc-​dis.pdf. —​—​—​. “The Social Model of Disability:  Thirty Years On”. Disability & Society, Vol. 28:  No. 7, 2013, pp.1024–​1026. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. —​—​—​. “Social Policy and Disability: Some Theoretical Issues”. Disability, Handicap & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1986. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Oliver, Mike, Bob Sapey and Pam Thomas. Social Work with Disabled People Volume 4. Red Globe Press, 2012. Perillo, Lucia. “Beautiful Decay: The Poetry of Lucia Perillo”. Interview with Sophie Grimes. Publishers Weekly, 18 March 2016, www.publishersweekly.com/​pw/​by-​topic/​authors/​profiles/​article/​69704-​ beautiful-​decay-​the-​poetry-​of-​lucia-​perillo.html. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. —​—​—​. “The Body Mutinies”. The Body Mutinies. Purdue University Press, 1996, p.30. —​—​—​. “The BodyMutiny. Interview with Maria McLeod”. Poetry Foundation. 24 June 2009, www. poetryfoundation.org/​articles/​69324/​the-​body-​mutiny. Accessed 14 Oct. 2019. —​—​—​. “Dear (Hypothetical) Reader: An Interview with Lucia Perillo”. Interview with Kevin Larimer. Poets & Writers. March/​ April 2009, www.pw.org/​content/​dear_​hypothetical_​reader. Accessed 2 Sept. 2017. —​—​—​. “Elephant”. The Body Mutinies. Purdue University Press, 1996, pp.36–​37. —​—​—​. “An Interview with Lucia Perillo”. Interview with Lesley Valdes. The American Poetry Review. 1 July 2014, pp.21–​24. —​—​—​. I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature.Trinity University Press, 2007. —​—​—​. “Kilned”. The Body Mutinies. Purdue University Press, 1996, p.38. —​—​—​. “Retablo with Multiple Sclerosis and Saints”. The Body Mutinies. Purdue University Press, 1996, pp.31–​34. —​—​—​. “Shrike Tree”. The American Poetry Review,Vol. 31, No. 5, 2002, p.27. —​—​—​. “Virtue Is the Best Helmet”. Inseminating the Elephant. Copper Canyon Press, 2009, p.3.

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Johanna Emeney Raggatt, Matthew. “New Zealand Poet Michele Leggott Sets Her Sights on Telling Life Story”. The Sydney Morning Herald. 26 Apr. 2013, www.smh.com.au/​national/​act/​new-​zealand-​poet-​michele-​leggott-​ sets-​her-​sights-​on-​telling-​life-​story-​20131125-​2y6fm.html. Shakespeare, Tom. “Disability, Identity, Difference”. Exploring the Divide:  Illness and Disability, edited by Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer, The Disability Press, 1996, pp.94–​113. Shakespeare, Tom and Watson, N. “The Social Model of Disability:  An Outdated Ideology”. Research 18. http://​disability-​studies.leeds.ac.uk/​files/​library/​ in Social Science and Disability, Vol. 2, pp.9–​ Shakespeare-​social-​model-​of-​disability.pdf. Accessed 29 Sept. 2017. Smith, Danez. “dear white America.” Poetry Foundation. www.poetryfoundation.org/​poems/​150542/​ dear-​white-​america. Accessed 20 Oct. 2019. Sutton-​ Spence, Rachel. An Overview of Sign Language Poetry, December 2003, http://​sign-​lang. ruhosting.nl/​echo/​docs/​SL_​poetry.pdf. Accessed 18 October 2017. Sutton-​Spence, Rachel and Ronice Muller De Quadros. “ ‘I Am The Book’: Deaf Poets Views on Signed Poetry”. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Vol. 19, No. 4, June 2014, pp.546–​558, https://​doi. org/​10.1093/​deafed/​enu020. Thomas, Carol. “Developing the Social Relational in the Social Model of Disability:  A Theoretical Agenda”. Implementing the Social Model of Disability: Theory and Research, edited by Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer, The Disability Press, 2004, pp.32–​47. —​—​—​. Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability. Open University Press, 1999. —​—​—​. Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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20 DISABILITY POETRY Testing the waters of definition Michael Northen

In his 2007 essay “Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love the Limp,” Jim Ferris set out what might have been the first list of characteristics of disability poetry: A challenge to stereotypes and an insistence on self-​definition. Foregrounding the perspective of people with disabilities. An emphasis on embodiment. Alternative techniques and poetics. While Ferris himself would be the first to say that his conception of disability poetry is open to modification, it is one that still holds up well and has the merit of not being confined to a single definition. Of course, what we now call disability poetry was present before Ferris’ formulation. It was present prior to the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disability Act in the United States. One could trace it back to the publication of Towards Solomon’s Mountain by A. J. Baird in 1986. Three years earlier Baird had put out a call for poetry in Kaleidoscope, the United States’ first journal dedicated to disability writing and art, for poetry about physical disability that was tough minded and grounded in concrete physical fact. His anthology was the result. Even prior to Towards Solomon’s Mountain, however, several authors in the latter half of the twentieth century were amassing a body of work that qualified them as pioneers in the field. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these for his impact on future writers and the genre in general was Larry Eigner. Important to what Ferris described as “foregrounding the perspective of people with disabilities” was the fact that Eigner had lived with disability since birth. Larry Eigner was born with cerebral palsy. He was in no way an identity poet, though Eigner scholar Jennifer Bartlett points out, there was no sense of a disability identity in Eigner’s time as there is today. He came to the attention of the poetry world through his association with Cid Cormon, Robert Creeley and the Black Mountain School of poetry. While the latter influenced the appearance of his poetry on the page, two aspects of his disability ultimately helped shape his work.The first was the necessity of writing about what he could observe from the limited space that he could look out at from his porch. The second was the physical limitations of his fingers in the use of a typewriter. Eigner compared himself to a ten-​fingered piano player who could

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only use one finger. All of these factors find their way in to the shaping of his book From the Sustaining Air, published in 1953. Though Eigner lived until 1996, few outside (and even within) the world of disability studies were aware of his work until the publication of Michael Davidson’s breakthrough essay, fittingly called “Missing Larry” in a 1999 issue of Sagetrieb. Since then his work has continued to gain traction and in 2020 the first full biography of Eigner’s life and works, written by Jennifer Bartlett, is scheduled for publication. Bartlett’s connection to Eigner makes her one of the most interesting contemporary poets to look at in applying Ferris’ characteristics of disability poetry to the poems produced by actual writers. Even at the time she co-​edited Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2011), an anthology that helped to put disability poetry on the map in the United States, Bartlett did not see herself as primarily a “disability poet.” Her background and interests were much more in the tradition of the Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, and language poetry, than in creating a genre of disability poetry. Nevertheless, as a woman with cerebral palsy, Bartlett’s disability became not primarily a subject of her poetry but a formative factor in the way that she wrote. In this sense, then, her work provides a natural forum for looking at work that qualifies as disability poetry by Ferris criteria without actually setting out to do so. Bartlett describes her cerebral palsy not as a disability or bodily condition but as a form of movement. If Ferris sees both content and form as aspects of disability poetry, Bartlett complicates this bifurcation by adding a third:  marketing. For Bartlett, the majority of the poetry about disability that makes it into main presses and public eye gets there primarily because it appeals to the familiar stereotype of visible disability as tragedy in order to create sales for the book. She notes, “like Eigner, for me poetry is about language, music, beauty and form. Not identity and story. Each of the poems does tell a story –​but the story is always illusive and secondary” (“Interview”). Rather than making disability the content of her poetry, Bartlett is invested in dismantling barriers through breaking down traditional forms which she views as a manifestation of society’s ableism.This project is on full display in Autobiography/​Anti-​ Autobiography, Bartlett’s continually evolving poem. Much of Autobiography/​Anti-​Autobiography can be distilled into what are probably her most well-​known lines: to walk means to fall to thrust forward       to fall and catch the seemingly random is its own system of gestures based on a series of neat errors       falling and catching to thrust forward sometimes the body misses then collapses sometimes it shatters with this particular knowledge a movement spastic 242

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      and unwieldy is its own lyric and the able-​bodied are tone-​deaf to this singing (7, 1–​18) While Ferris suggests in his seminal essay “The Enjambed Body” that his own uneven gait could serve as the basis for a differently-​rhythmed poetry, Bartlett’s poem shows how this plays out in actual composition. Though Bartlett uses short breath-​like lines similar to Creeley, the actual focus of her poem is not on breath, per se, but on how she physically experiences walking. The lines move out of alignment not to explore the uses of white space but to record the falling that takes places as an integral part of her natural walk. Lennard J. Davis has made much of the concept of the invention of normalcy, which he says entered the English language in 1840 as “constituting, conforming to, not deviating or differing from the common type or standard, the usual” and the ways in which the social imperative to be measured against a bell-​curve has marginalized those with obvious physical differences (24). Bartlett challenges such marginalization, not through polemic, but through rhythmically and viscerally pulling the reader into her own experience. In trying to open up a world of music to which ordinary readers are tone-​deaf, her poem becomes an apologia for disability poetry. Unlike some of the more anthem-​like poems of the disability rights movement, there is no false sense of bravado: sometimes it shatters with this particular knowledge The body itself is a source of knowledge. In asserting that her movements are not random but only a system seemingly so (based upon “neat” errors), she also lives with the weight of the knowledge of how that body is perceived. This knowledge can be “shattering.” While it allows Bartlett to assert that the way her body functions is not “less than” but only different, it also carries with it in the realization that even with this knowledge, she will be constantly subject to what has Erving Goffman christened “the gaze” (3). If the above poem tries to build on the experience of a nonnormative body through the use of alternative rhythms, the second poem of Autobiography more overtly challenges ableist attitudes: so that, the mother might say your child must be angry because you are disabled so I told her, your child must be angry because you are a bitch and the children ask why do you talk like that? and I ask them why do you talk like that? 243

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and children grow up knowing this is ordinary (9, 1–​12) While the emphasis on poetics is still uppermost in the poem, preventing it from becoming didactic, Bartlett brings to the surface the default assumption that disability is something only to be considered or characterized in negative terms. It is an assumption that disability studies scholars have been trying to bring into awareness since the field emerged: our ordinary language of discourse not only reinforces stereotypes and pejorative characterizations, it breeds them. It is the water we swim in. Though Bartlett is illustrating the way in which we unconsciously pass these prejudices along to our children as parents or members of society, it would be a mistake to think this bias is something somehow confined to those who are uneducated or unaware of language. It continues in more subtle forms even in contemporary poetry. Recently, Jillian Weise angrily responded to the much celebrated poem “Good Bones,” by Maggie Smith, with a poem of her own, asking “What if you don’t have good bones?” (Northen, “Still”). An assumption that the audience is always able-​bodied and the building of metaphors upon that assumption –​as Smith does –​is one of the things Bartlett militates against. One of her tactics is to return to her roots in objectivist poetry and generally eschew metaphor in her work. Rather than challenging content by countering negative metaphors of disability with positive ones, her emphasis is on language, form and function. As Jim Ferris insists in “The Facts of Life,”“we are not signs” (The Facts of Life, 24, 18). An additional feature of Bartlett’s poetry, pointed out by Cheré M. Smith, is that much of the work in Autobiography turns on the concept of accessibility. On the one hand, the normative public is “tone deaf ” to the systematic rhythms created by Bartlett’s body. To them, the knowledge that her body offers is inaccessible. At the same time, because of her own unique body and people’s reactions to it, Bartlett has access to fear of those who are –​at least temporarily –​ able-​bodied: to be crippled means to have access to people’s fear of their own erosion (Autobiography 12, 8–​9) For Bartlett, as for many others involved in disability studies, one of the motivations for marginalizing those with disabilities, particularly disabilities as obvious as Bartlett’s, is their reminder that all bodies are permeable, subject to disability and decay. It is essentially a denial of the nature of their own bodies and ultimately of death. As Bartlett writes, “to be crippled means to have a window/​into the insanity of the able bodied” (Autobiography 12, 1–​2). Bartlett did not write with the intention of establishing a rubric for disability poetry. Her poetry is in a continual state of evolution, a constant reshaping of poems from their first appearances in her early, heavily projectivist-​influenced chapbook, Derivative of the Moving Image (2007). Nevertheless, with Autobiography/​Anti-​Autobiography (2014) she has produced a work that satisfies Ferris’ postulated characteristics of disability poetry on all four counts. She has made the body central to her work –​not just any body, but her own particular palsied body. In doing so, she pushes back against stereotypes derived from an ablest-​centered view of the world, including the negative metaphors for disability that it generates. Her experimentation with form is not a theoretical overlay on pre-​established subject matter but something that grow out of what her body has taught her. While Bartlett’s work goes a long way to fulfilling Ferris’ conception of and hopes for what disability poetry could be, it did not appear in a vacuum. Coming almost two decades after 244

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Eigner, but long before Ferris, Vassar Miller can be credited with initiating the push for poets to not only disclose but also to write about their own experiences of disability in their work. Miller accomplished this first through the publication of collected writing of others in Despite This Flesh (1985) and eventually in her own collected works If I had Wheels or Love (1991).With the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States a number of important poetry books began to appear including Tom Andrews’ The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle (1994), Floyd Skloot’s Music Appreciation (1994), Kenny Fries’ Anesthesia (1996) and Stephen Kuusisto’s Only Bread, Only Light (2000). Though none of these writers called themselves poets of disability or, as Ferris was later to christen them, crip poets, each of these contributed in some way. Ferris himself made a double contribution to the emerging field in 2004 by publishing “The Enjambed Body: A Step Towards a Crippled Poet” in the Georgia Review and backing it up with the publication of his own book, The Hospital Poems, possibly the first collection of poems with disabilities to find a wide audience. While Bartlett’s Autobiography/​Anti-​Autobiography, with its emphasis on visible physical disability, can be viewed as a classic text against which to consider whether a poem qualifies as disability literature, many other poets have helped to enlarge the definition making it more inclusive and in some sense, blurring the boundaries that attempt to define disability. Disability, after all, is a huge umbrella. Jillian Weise’s The Amputees Guide to Sex (2007) brings feminism to bear on disability. Kathi Wolfe’s The Uppity Blind Girl Poems (2015) explores disability from an LGBTQ perspective. In 2009, Daniel and David Simpson, twin poets blind from birth, self-​ released poems available only on audio CD, fittingly called Audio Poems (2008). Each perspective has helped to transform the definition of disability poetry. The inclusion of D/​deaf poets under the disability poetics umbrella provides an interesting challenge. Advocates of Deaf culture have long rejected the title “disabled,” preferring instead the analogy of a non-​English speaking community side-​lined by mainstream culture. In 2009 John Lee Clark edited Deaf American Poetry (2009). Clark’s anthology attempts to build a history of Deaf poetry beginning as far as the early 1800s. Noteworthy in the anthology is the first English translation of Clayton Valli’s well-​known American Sign Language (ASL) poem “Dandelions.” Long opposed to having his poetry translated because of the loss it would suffer in English,Valli finally relented and allowed Raymond Luczak to translate it. Though Deaf American Poetry was published by Gaulladet University, Luczak and Clark worked together independent of university support to publish their writing and that of other Deaf writers, a project that culminated in Luczak’s establishment of Handtype Press, dedicated solely to the publication of Deaf literature. As a poet, Clark is in an interesting position in being able to straddle the line between Deaf and disability culture. Born deaf, he became blind at about twelve years old. In his earlier poems, Clark tended to focus on his experience as a deaf man or a member of the Deaf community, as in “Long Goodbyes” or “The Only Way Signing Can Kill Us.” With “The Bully,” however, he moved into new territory: We boys were marching up to Rodman Hall for supper and he stopped and I bumped into him He whirled around and pointed at me and touched his lips with his middle finger and slicked it back over his head I protested He said yes you touch my butt I said me not not see you accident 245

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He said not believe you Before breakfast next morning he saw me watching Gilligan’s Island He switched the channel Hey He laughed Next morning he did the same thing I said oh that better thank you He frowned and pressed the remote That interesting me like Switch switch switch Then Gilligan’s Island was on again I said no no not that awful boring please other other He laughed and left Gilligan’s Island on One time I was in the shower room and a rocket of water slammed into me Fire extinguisher I couldn’t see anything except for a baseball cap It was his cap I laughed and said more more feel good come on His last year I was still learning the art of the white cane and sometimes got delayed tapping off course at night One night I  veered off between Noyes Hall and Frechette Hall and a boy offered his arm I didn’t know who until under a lamp I saw a baseball cap Inside Frechette Hall I thanked him and he smiled A few minutes later Gary Karow our houseparent came up to me and told me that the bully was so happy after helping me and maybe I should ask him next time I needed help I never did Some years later he drove down to Texas with a friend to help him pick up a pick up truck On his way back alone it was twilight and he turned off his headlights and veered left into oncoming traffic A car swerved in time Another swerved Then it was a truck that couldn’t swerve and that baseball cap (1–​34) For a sighted person, a first glance reveals the way the lines sprawl on the page in varying lengths, from one word to thirty-​four and in no particular visual pattern. Daniel Simpson, in his essay “Line Breaks the Way I See Them,” describes the eureka moment in which he realized that for him, the appearance of lines on a page were irrelevant. Clark not only signals agreement with this proposition, but also lets readers know that while sighted readers may make up the majority of the literary population he is not allowing them to be his default primary audience. This intention becomes clear in the fifth line of the poem,“I said me not not see you accident.” Despite the use of the words, “he said” there are no quotation marks around the words uttered by the speaker. There is also no use of punctuation. This is not because Clark rejects punctuation as a cultural convention or fancies himself a modern-​day E. E. Cummings. It is because quotation marks and other visual forms of punctuation have no meaning in American Sign Language.

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Unlike Bartlett’s poems, Clark’s writing is affirmatively about story. In creating the poem’s narrative Clark recapitulates his own experiences. While it is probably clear to the reader by the fifth line that the poem’s narrator uses ASL, the fact that he is becoming increasingly blind is only obvious later on, two-​thirds of the way through the poem, with the words “I was still learning the art of the white cane.” Clark builds an ironic parallelism between the narrator and the bully into the poem. As the narrator’s sight decreases, he gains in understanding about the bully. When the narrator veers off course due to lack of light, he is rescued by the bully. The bully, who has sight, purposely shuts off his lights and moves straight into oncoming traffic. Throughout the poem, the bully is faceless, increasingly reduced to a baseball cap. Clark’s sense of audience also becomes apparent in his use of sensory material. Touching is prominent in the poem –​bumping, being slammed by water, tapping on the ground with a cane –​as being central to the experience of a deaf/​blind reader. Sight is restricted to a few basic objects, but there is no appeal to sound. Nothing in the poem is lost to a reader who is unable to hear. It is also worth noting that because Clark does not make white space an integral part of his poem, nothing on that account is denied to the reader who is accessing the poem in Braille. As groundbreaking as “The Bully” is, Clarke’s most important poem to date may be “Goldilocks in Denial.” “Goldilocks” uses several of the same techniques as “The Bully” such as a de-​emphasis on regular rhythms and auditory techniques and the employment of ASL-​ inspired English syntax, but rather than bringing ASL users and blind characters into a situation in which they begin to understand each other, it puts them on a collision course: Goldilocks was in deep denial and refused to use a white cane That’s how she got lost in the woods stumbling over tree roots and things Then she hit a wall A house Door She entered and wrinkled her nose and remembered the Annie movie from when she was little It was the part where Daddy Warbucks said I smell a wet dog It was dark inside so she did her ginger duck walk and zombie arms until she came against a table with some food on it After emptying a bag of Doritos she wandered deeper into the house Kitchen bathroom living room small chair too small medium sized chair too hard big recliner ahh that’s much better When the three bears got home they were happy to find that they had company Papa Bear shook Goldilocks awake and asked who you When she didn’t answer Papa Bear put his paw under her hand She snatched her hand back and said I can see Papa Bear said okay and asked again who you She said I’m from Long Island here vacation Papa Bear asked when arrive here you She said my name yellowcurls Papa Bear asked need help you She said will soon graduate May Papa Bear gave up and turned to Mama Bear and said denial obvious misunderstand misunderstand

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Mama Bear said sad yes nothing can do leave alone Baby Bear asked if he could play with yellowcurls Mama Bear thought about it and said no better not yellowcurls denial means hard talk can’t play good So the whole bear clan went about their business as if Goldilocks wasn’t sitting there She jumped up and stamped her feet and said not nice you ignore avoid me She whirled around to make a dramatic exit but ended up in the bedroom where she stumbled and fell into a bed She stayed on the bed for a long time pretending that she had planned to sleep there all along (1–​28) As the title stipulates, Goldilocks denies her disability. She is prototypical of those who accept the medical model of disability as something that is an individual problem to be overcome. As such she denies her need for an accommodation (in the form of a white cane) and, as eventually happens in trying to pass, she hits a wall. In this case, quite literally. By contrast, the bears see themselves as a community. They are able to communicate and function quite well within their own house using their own language. Within that house disability does not exist. In the scenario that Clark has set up Goldilocks and the bears talk past each other. When Papa, realizing Goldilocks is blind tries to invite her in by appealing to the common sense of touch, Goldilocks not only denies her disability but rejects the offer. Despite the seemingly healthier and more open attitude of the bears, however, they, too, are left in the situation of only being able to communicate with those in their own community. In the end, the only option they see open to them is to ignore the person with the disability. The division between the Deaf and the disabilities communities is still readily apparent. In 2016 the newly formed Disability Writers Caucus representing advocacy for writers at the annual Association for Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference changed its name to the D/​deaf and Disabled Writers Caucus, and in 2017 the UK’s first anthology dedicated solely to the work of poets with disabilities, Stairs and Whispers, is subtitled D/​deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back. In forcing the two groups together in one poem, Clark highlights this situation. As a writer who can identify with both groups and whose poems definitely fulfill the criteria that Ferris initiated, Clark both expands the possibilities for disabilities poetry and highlights the problem of attempting to come up with a single definition of what disability poetry is. Even as Clark’s work points to the contribution that disability poetry can make to poetry in general through the incorporation of language from ASL, he hints at another possibility for poetry even further off the beaten track. As it stands now, neither printed text nor ASL poetry nor even audio recordings of poetry can find a direct route to those who are Deaf/​blind. A potential alternative exists for them in the form of Tactile ASL or TASL. Something of a misnomer, TASL allows for communication through the touching of a body part such the forearm to communicate information. Noting that we are now only at the “huge fantastically contoured iceberg that is ASL,” Clark can only say for the moment, “There is TASL poetry, like waves rolling over the shore of your palm” (114). John Lee Clark and Jennifer Bartlett provide just two of the many possible examples of what disability poetry might look like, even as they also seek a commonality. Their approaches reflect two different perspectives or, perhaps, trajectories that lay open to poets with disabilities. Bartlett’s commitment to promoting and engaging other writers with disabilities is manifested in her editorship of Beauty Is a Verb, participation in the establishment of the D/​deaf and Disabled Writers Caucus and co-​founding of Zoeglossia, an organization creating conference opportunities for new writers with disabilities, cannot be questioned. Nevertheless, Bartlett 248

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considers herself a poet first. Her goal for herself and other disabled writers is to see their work featured prominently in public venues without reference to disability or being labeled a niche writer. In her forthcoming book, limits are what any of us are inside of, she brings the life and work of Larry Eigner to the public. By contrast, Clark has been increasingly concerned with how to make whatever poetry he and others create accessible to Deaf, blind and Deaf/​blind writers. He recently wrote, “The public is not my audience, though it is welcome to eavesdrop” (Northen, “Still”).The editing of Deaf American Poetry and Deaf Lit Extravaganza (2013) sharpened his awareness of the degree to which D/​deaf writers have been excluded and his recent essay “Distantism” (2017) lays bare the ways that the literary world –​including other writers with disabilities –​ostracizes Deaf/​blind audiences. As for his own poetry, Clark, a continual experimenter, rarely allows his old work to be republished, saying, “When I get into something new, the old is dead, dead, dead! Or at least it is to me” (Northen, “Still”). Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, which was edited by Bartlett in 2011 and proved such a seminal anthology in the United States, was largely based upon Ferris’ characterization of disability. While the impetus for the volume was to push back against negative representation of visible physical disability, it began to immediately draw criticism for not being expansive enough. The most frequent criticism was its emphasis on disability as visible and physical. As Canadian critic Shane Neilson put it, “a problem comes in the separation of physical, ‘visible’ disability and so-​called ‘invisible’ disability from one another” (Neilson). Nevertheless, Beauty Is a Verb (and with it, Ferris’, Barlett’s and Clark’s conception of disability poetry), became the catalyst for other important anthologies such as Stairs and Whispers in the UK, Shaping the Fractured Self (2017) in Australia and Imaginary Safe House (2019) in Canada that provided their editors groundwork characteristics to enlarge upon and the opportunity to formulate their own visions of disability poetry. With increased public awareness about disability poetry, new journals (Deaf Poets Society and Rogue Agent) and recent groundbreaking anthologies, the criteria that Jim Ferris proposed a decade ago is steadily evolving. As significant as their contributions are, Jennifer Bartlett and John Lee Clark are only two among the many emerging poets whose work is shaping disability poetry. All indications are that, like the nature of disability itself, its poetry will continue to reinvent itself.

Works cited Alland, Sandra, Khairani Barokka and Daniel Sluman, eds. Stairs and Whispers: D/​deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back. Rugby, UK: Nine Arches Press, 2017. Baird, J. L. and D. S. Workman. Towards Solomon’s Mountain: The Experience of Disability Poetry. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986. Bartlett, Jennifer. Autobiography/​Anti-​Autobiography. Palmyra, NY: theenk Books, 2014. —​—​—​. “Connections: For Larry Eigner, Robert Creeley Was a Lifetime Influence.” Poetry Foundation. Online Journal. April 19, 2017. —​—​—​. “A Cripping of Projective Verse.” Wordgathering. Online Journal.Vol. 9, Issue 3, September 2013. —​—​—​. Derivative of the Moving Image. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. —​—​—​. “Interview with Jennifer Bartlett.” Wordgathering. Online Journal.Vol. 5, Issue 2, June 2011. Bartlett, Jennifer, Sheila Black and Michael Northen, eds. Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos, 2011. Clark, John Lee. “The Bully.” Wordgathering. Online Journal.Vol. 6, Issue 1, March 2012. —​—​—​, ed. Deaf American Poetry. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2009. —​—​—​. “Distantism.” Notes from a Deaf/​Blind Writer. Online blog. August 2017. —​—​—​. “Goldilocks in Denial.” Wordgathering. Online Journal.Vol. 9, Issue 2, June 2015. Davidson, Michael. “Missing Larry: The poetics of Disability in the Work of Larry Eigner.” Sagetrieb, Vol. 8, Issue 1: 5–​27.

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Michael Northen Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy. London: Verso, 1996. Ferris, Jim. “Crip Poetry or How I Learned to Love the Limp.” Wordgathering. Online Journal.Vol. 1, Issue 2, June 2007. —​—​—​. “The Enjambed Body: A Step Towards a Crippled Poet.” Georgia Review, Vol. 58, Issue 2, 2004, pp. 219–​233. —​—​—​. “The Facts of Life.” The Facts of Life. Madison, WI: Parallel Press. 2006. —​—​—​. The Hospital Poems. Mint Street, NC: Main Street Rag, 2004. Goffman, E. Stigma: Notes on the management of Spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963. Johnson, Heather Taylor. Shaping the Fractured Self. Perth, Australia: UWA Press, 2017. Neilson, Shane. “Beauty Is Invisible Too.” Wordgathering. Online Journal.Vol. 12, Issue 4, December 2018. Neilson, Shane, Roxanna Bennett and Ally Fleming, eds. Imaginary Safe House. Hamilton, Ontario: Frog Hollow Press and Hamilton Letters & Arts, 2019. Northen, Michael. “Still Present Tense: The Poets of Beauty Is a Verb.” Wordgathering. Online Journal. Vol. 42, Issue 2, June 2017. Simpson, Daniel. “Line Breaks the Way I See them” in On the Outskirts: Poems of Disability. Philadelphia, PA: Inglis House Poetry Workshop, 2006. Smith, Cheré M. “Frames of Reference in Larry Eigner and Jennifer Bartlett.” Wordgathering. Online Journal.Vol. 6, Issue 3, September 2012.

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PART IV

Drama

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21 CANADIAN DISABILITY DRAMATURGIES Kirsty Johnston

In June 2019, Ali Stroker made history as the first wheelchair user both to be nominated for and receive a Tony award. Winning Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Musical for her portrayal of Ado Annie, the girl who “cain’t say no” in the Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, she broke new ground, just as she had in 2015 when she became Broadway’s first actor in a wheelchair, performing in Deaf West’s much-​lauded revival of the musical Spring Awakening. Speaking with reporters right after the Oklahoma! win, Stroker invited “theater owners and producers to really look into how they can begin to make the backstage accessible so that performers with disabilities can get around” (Salam). Her remarks called out the striking irony that the Tony awards producers had not made their Radio City Music Hall venue accessible; no one had thought, at this of all shows, to make an accessible ramp to the stage from the audience. Unlike all of her non-​ disabled professional theatre colleagues and competitors who could easily take the stage from the house, Stroker had had to wait backstage and enter from the wings. In an interview the next day with Michael Paulson for The New York Times, she explained further how she felt about the situation: I think I had a dream that maybe there could be a ramp built. It’s more than just a logistical thing –​it’s saying that you are accepted here, in every part of you. I know that the Tonys did the best that they could, and I know that Radio City did the best they could. I am not naïve –​there are a lot of logistical things you have to deal with around buildings that were built a long, long time ago. They did put in a ramp backstage. And I had a seat in the front, but the way the night worked out, I never got to my seat. The tension between Stroker’s artistic victory and this demonstration of professional theatre’s enduring and overwhelming material inaccessibility, continues to be felt by disability performance artists, activists and scholars around the world. As one such person listening to Stroker’s news from Canada, I was immediately struck by the way her remarks resonated with those offered fifteen years earlier by Canadian disability rights activist Rick Hansen:

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Being able to get in and out of a building is not enough.You need meaningful access. That means being able to use the coffee shop and bathroom, just like everyone else. You can get into theatres now, but can you also get on stage? That has to be the goal. (qtd. in Picard) Both Stroker and Hansen underline how important the material realities of theatre-​making are for thinking about disability and drama.Those who seek to challenge the ways in which disability is invoked, embodied and represented in drama must also think about how their contemporary spaces and protocols for training, auditioning, casting, designing, stage managing, rehearsing, workshopping, publishing, promoting, professionalizing, socializing, and witnessing both serve, and fail to serve, disabled people. It would be a mistake to read Stroker’s or Hansen’s comments as those of heroic individual overcomers newly discovering cracks in an old but otherwise benevolent system. Rather, both of their insights connect to a much larger disability arts and cultural activism and scholarship that has helped to identify theatre’s complicity in generating ableist framings of disability experience for millennia. Whether contemporary theatre takes place in a country like the US that has the Americans with Disabilities Act or one like Canada, which does not, both Stroker and Hansen point out the material features of meaningful theatre access, those decisions that indicate whether or not “every part of you is accepted.” Here I hope to give some sense of the ways that playwrights, dramaturgs and theatre practitioners with ties to Canadian disability theatre practice have sought to trouble theatre’s disabling engines in order to create more accessible, inclusive and generative relationships between disabled people and stages. In the limited space of this chapter, I cannot offer an exhaustive account of all this activity but will highlight key examples in the hopes of suggesting its depth, range and continuing vibrancy. The pivotal roles that accessible stages, backstage gathering places and bathrooms play in building inclusive societies is something of a long-​standing theme in Canadian disability drama and theatre. For example, internationally successful Canadian playwright Lyle Victor Albert (after whom the Lyle Victor Albert Performing Arts Centre in Bonnyville, Alberta, was named) includes a pivotal shaving scene in his 1995 autobiographical play Scraping the Surface, an exploration of his adventures and misadventures as an Albertan youth growing up with CP. In Time to Put My Socks On (2008), playwright Alan Shain, who also has CP, brings audiences into the backspace privacy of his apartment, where, clad only in underwear, he references everyday objects like toothpaste and tube socks to explore the tensions he has with his non-​disabled girlfriend. Written well before these two plays, the backstage space of a men’s bathroom is also precisely what David Freeman’s nearly fifty-​year-​old play Creeps brought to the stage when it premiered in 1971 at Toronto’s Factory Theatre. With the longest production history of any Canadian disability theatre play, Creeps won the inaugural Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1973 and garnered Freeman the 1974 New York Drama Desk Award for best new playwright. It was the first production of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre (a now famous hub for Canadian dramaturgy) and in 2011 Tarragon offered a staged reading of the play to celebrate their fortieth anniversary. UK and North American remounts over the past decades and recent professional productions in Seattle and Vancouver suggest the enduring place that Creeps holds in Canadian drama. Equally, however, it also holds a place in an emerging international canon of contemporary plays by disabled playwrights.Victoria Ann Lewis places it first among the plays included in her landmark 2006 collection Beyond Victims and Villains:  Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights, arguing that it “prematurely [bore] theatrical witness to wrongs that would not find political analysis and advocacy until later in the decade” (xxxiv). Lewis emphasizes Freeman’s pioneering decision in Creeps to feature many different disabled characters in cahoots and argument together. This decision, she asserts, allowed him to move past the inherited stereotypical 254

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representations of disabled people as merely victims or villains. Instead, their camaraderie and debates gave them depth and complexity, illustrated variety among disability experiences and, powerfully, showed “the lived experience of disability as a collective, social process, not an individual destiny” (xxv). The setting Freeman chose to explore these collective, social processes was the men’s bathroom of a sheltered workshop for what the original play notes describe as “cerebral palsy victims” (xiv).These notes further explain that,“A ‘sheltered workshop’ is a place where disabled people can go and work at their own pace without the pressure of the competitive outside world. Its aim is not to provide a living wage for the C.P., but rather to occupy his idle hours” (xiv). In his Author’s Statement, Freeman explained that the play was born of my own frustration, working in a Toronto sheltered workshop where I sanded blocks, folded boxes and separated nuts and bolts. It deals with people who have the courage to take their destiny in their own hands. (4) The bathroom offers refuge to the five main characters, men who, like Freeman, count CP among their lived experiences. Pete, Sam, Tom, Jim and Michael gather, debate serious life decisions, goof around, swear, play pranks, flush toilets, smoke, discuss art and sex and porn, antagonize the supervisory nurse and generally avoid the uninspiring, belittling, charity-​framed work they have been given to do there.The space is gritty, restrictive and evidently far removed from the high impact socio-​political and artistic work for which some of the characters explicitly long.Thus, in Creeps Freeman was less interested in representing the tasks and social veneers of the ableist formal workshop space than the disabled-​led backspace of the bathroom. Here he could feature the unvarnished drama of disabled people in conversation with each other about the challenges of taking “destiny in their own hands.” The character Jim, who has been to university and through this and other institutional acquiescence has been given a leadership role at the workshop, becomes the voice of a liberal approach to building change incrementally from within the charitable system. He is taunted by the others’ more radical politics, however, as they seek a greater revolt against the infantilizing, disempowering assumptions that drive the enterprise.Tom wants Jim to join him in an immediate and final exit from the workshop. He exhorts Jim to develop his writing talent, ideally to share the stories of the men like them trapped in this disabling system:

Tom: You could go into journalism, write a book. Listen, in this job, who can you tell it to? Spastics. Now think. Think of all the millions of jerks on the outside who have no idea what it’s really like in here. Hell, you could write a best-​seller. (34) For his part,Tom dreams of becoming a professional artist, inspired in part by the positive review a local art critic has given his paintings.The others caution, however, that the review itself might derive from a charitable impulse akin to that driving the workshop. Tom’s experience prompts the men to speak and argue passionately about the connections between aesthetics and politics. They also stress the importance of being heard and understood as socially enfranchised men. A  masculine backspace that keeps the supervising nurse at bay, it has two urinals, two stalls, a chair, a bench and a generally filthy atmosphere; a cockroach spotted in the urinal is called out by Pete as “livestock in the pisser” (18). In this earlier era, no automatic doors assist those in wheelchairs who must rely on the whims of others to get them in and out. The play emphasizes through a range of scenes the ableist power dynamics underpinning this system of 255

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having constantly to ask for permission and help to manage urinating or defecating. Bringing audiences into the bathroom space allows Freeman to get at the failings of the charitable model of disability at its most basic dehumanizing levels, a model that disempowers disabled people by preferring charity, ableist infrastructure and segregation to social responsibility, disabled-​led activism and inclusive acceptance of, following Stroker’s words, “every part of them.” Charitable impulses are further parodied by a series of grotesque scenes interrupting the critical debates of the bathroom and pitting the self-​serving impulses of do-​gooders against the characters’ needs to be recognized as socially valuable adult men. The first such scene arrives a few minutes into the play: Blackout. Circus music and bright lights. Enter two Shriners, a girl (Miss Cerebral Palsy) in a white bathing suit, and a chef. They dance around the boys, posing for pictures, blowing noisemakers, and generally molesting them in the name of charity. The chef stuffs hot dogs into their hands. They exit, the music fades, the light returns to normal. The boys throw their hot dogs over the back of the set. (4) Such scenes help to align audiences with Pete, Sam, Tom, Jim and Michael’s experiences of the shelter’s activities by rendering the charitable personnel as grotesque, imposing and molesting creeps. This scene in particular enacts the characters’ frustrations with the belittling and disenfranchising premises of the charity model. It also viscerally enacts, in the hot dog hand-​stuffing and throwing, their communal experience and political rejection of this model. Indeed, in this scene we see performed what Jane Campbell and Mike Oliver identified, in their influential 1996 book Disability Politics: Understanding Our Past, Changing Our Future, as a primary impulse in the founding of the disability movement: the shared recognition among disabled people “that neither party politics nor charitable and voluntary organisations were serving their interests appropriately or well” (62). Women are outsiders in this play, their stories are mostly absent and what is on offer lacks the perspectival depth of the other characters. Miss Saunders the nurse, for example, is shown only as a silly but shrewish figure. Then there is the unseen Thelma, whose alarming cries in a clear but “spastic” voice from outside the bathroom of “I need a priest” near the top, in the middle and at the close of the play provide the chief disabled woman’s voice (Freeman 1). Audiences learn that Thelma has changed from being a person who dressed in pretty clothes and laughed often into a person who cries routinely for a priest and covers herself in black and brown “right up to the neck” (18). The change follows a dubious sexual encounter, most likely rape, she experienced at the hands of Sam. These aspects as well as the bathing suit-​clad Miss Cerebral Palsy and the men’s frequent use of “bitch” and “cunt” to describe women contribute to what Canadian theatre critic Jerry Wasserman, who had seen the 1973 Vancouver Arts Club production, argued in 2016 is the “misogyny that dates the script.” Such dated aspects sit in tension with its apparent continuing resonance: the anniversary Tarragon reading in 2011 and two recent professional productions (one in Seattle in 2014 and another in Vancouver 2016). What does the play mean now? In a 2018 essay, playwright and actor Adam Grant Warren tackles this very question. Cast as Jim in the 2016 Vancouver production by Realwheels Theatre, a production that claimed to be the first to “feature a fully integrated cast of professional actors with and without disabilities,” Warren wrestled with the polarizing ways the script had made him feel over time. As an emerging theatre artist discovering it in 2004 on the advice of a friend, it gave him his first sense of “the power of bodies like mine on stage […] And there was I, an aspiring theatre-​maker who also happened to have CP, reading Freeman’s words and nodding my head hard enough to give 256

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myself whiplash.” Encountering the play twelve years later as an established theatre artist, however, he was surprised to find the play more “whiny” than “righteously indignant” and filled with what he felt was “thinly-​veiled victim dialogue”: I wondered who exactly this play was still resonating with: those with lived experience of disability, or those outside that experience, trying to get a look in? And if they got a look in, what would they see in such an old picture? In the end, would the audiences applaud the work as a whole, or the “inspiring” efforts of an integrated cast? And if the latter, wouldn’t that just reflect some of the very same power dynamics that were present in the workshops themselves? Even if the applause came for both the work and the “inspiration”, I wasn’t sure that would be enough for me. Pressing forward in the Realwheels production despite his misgivings, through the creation process and research, Warren ultimately discovered that where in 2004 he had found in the play a reflection of his own experience, in 2016, he was struck by his distance from its context: “the privilege, ability, and uncommon luck that has kept me blissfully ignorant of what sheltered workshops had meant to their occupants, and to society, just one short decade before I  was born.” Further, he emphasized the profound and prevailing lack of access and opportunities for so many disabled artists and his own drive to use his talents and platforms to “find, represent, and help in the making of newer, better work.” As we shall see below, Warren’s activist impulse connects him to the growing disability theatre activism that now makes it challenging to keep up with all the related drama being produced or developed. Before exploring this drama further, it is important to think of how disability arts and cultural activism since the play’s debut has also helped to date the script. In the play, Tom scoffed at the idea of Jim only writing for “spastics” as opposed to a larger world. Moreover, the original play notes provide considerable detail about how actors, clearly imagined as only non-​disabled, should prepare for and perform each character’s disability with care and consultation with disabled people. These details suggest how the playwright did not yet allow his characters to value an audience of disabled people nor imagine an artistic production team led by and filled with disabled artists. The absent sense of disability theatre community, pride, artistic leadership, skill and activism is striking. The absence is especially at odds with the goals and history of the 2016 producing company, Realwheels. A multi-​award-​winning company founded in 2003 by actor James Sanders, the Realwheels website explains that its mandate is “To create and produce performances that deepen the audiences’ understanding of the disability experience. […] We tell stories in which disability itself is not the focus of conflict, but rather forms the landscape upon which universal issues are debated onstage.” In the middle of his actor training, Sanders had an accident and became quadriplegic. With regard to theatre, Sanders explains on the Realwheels website Mission and History section that the attitudinal rather than the physical barriers he faced were the most challenging. In face of both sets of barriers, however, he persisted in his professional theatre training and practice. To date, Sanders’ most pivotal stage role was in Skydive (2007), a play co-​developed with award-​winning playwright Kevin Kerr as a vehicle for Sanders and his actor friend, Bob Frazer. In his introduction to the published version of the play, Kerr explains that together they dreamed of doing a show which challenged tedious convention by, as Frazer suggested, having the characters enter at the top of the show by “falling from the grid” (10). To make this possible, Sanders drew from his earlier participation in Vancouver’s KickstART Celebration of Disability Arts and Culture. An organization that continues to foster disability arts and culture in the city, the profoundly influential festivals they organized beginning in 257

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2001 drew disabled artists and allies from across Canada and beyond to build awareness of each others’ work and to galvanize the Canadian disability arts and culture movement. At KickstART Sanders met Sven Johansson, who had devised the ES Dance Instrument, an innovation whose name drew from the Latin “Excedere Saltatio” to suggest “Dance Exceeding Limitations” (Barr). In his introduction to the published play, Kerr describes the instrument as “essentially a long pole on a fulcrum” that had allowed Sanders and other festival artists in wheelchairs to dance, improvise and move freely and artistically in the air (11).The instrument, Sanders argued, could be mobilized and modified in service of the Skydive artists’ dream. Although the path was arduous, they followed through with the plan. Skydive told the story of two brothers, estranged and opposite in temperament, reconnecting to fulfill their dream of skydiving. Most of the show’s action takes place in the air, a space in which Sanders’ character seems non-​disabled. Unlike Creeps, this play was written specifically for a professionally trained disabled actor and, through Sanders, its artistic development team had a connection to and awareness of a growing disability arts and culture community. In this context, the audience of “spastics” that Tom rejects in Creeps would have been reconsidered and valued on their own terms and a playwright like Freeman would have benefited from Sanders and other disabled actors ready to take on roles. Although Sanders left the company in 2014 to pursue more individual projects, Realwheels has continued to build artistic development and performance opportunities for disabled artists and their 2016 production of Creeps sought to continue this pattern. Ultimately, their production won several of the city’s annual professional theatre awards: Outstanding Production, Outstanding Ensemble Performance and Outstanding Design. The ensemble, of which Warren was the only cast member with CP, included disabled and non-​disabled actors, some of whom had completed actor training and others who had not. Carrie Sandahl, in her 2005 article “The Tyranny of Neutral: Disability and Actor Training,” and Kathy Dacre and Alex Bulmer, in their 2009 article “Into the Scene and Its Impact on Inclusive Performance Training,” identify the importance of building inclusivity into actor training as a fundamental goal for disability theatre artists. Many disabled playwrights, for example, balk at the idea of non-​disabled actors “cripping up” to take on the roles of disabled characters in their plays. It is also extremely frustrating for many to see how often non-​ disabled actors win awards for such turns and how often these casting choices are explained away through arguments about there not being enough talented disabled actors in the casting pools. For recent Canadian explorations of these ideas, readers might watch a film on Brock University’s Diversities in Actor Training series focused on ableism or they might listen to the podcast Walking the Space by Yousef Kadoura, an actor and graduate of Canada’s National Theatre School who is also a right leg below the knee amputee. Kadoura explains on the podcast that the series aims to “open a conversation about Canadian theatre and its relationship to its artists who live with a physical disability.” One person Kadoura interviewed was Prince Amponsah, a Toronto-​based actor who trained at George Brown Theatre School and performed at Canada’s prestigious Shaw Festival. At the age of twenty-​seven, he became disabled after a house fire and in the podcast he speaks about finding his way back to theatre after that. Both Yousef and Amponsah explore their use of prosthetics and physicality in performance and the ethics of taking on roles that explicitly involve disability or not. In 2016, both performed in After the Blackout, a play written by multi-​award-​winning playwright Judith Thompson.Writing about the production experience in an article entitled “Disability, Represented” for Intermission Magazine (2018), Amponsah explained that, [a]‌s an actor living with a disability –​I’m a bilateral arm amputee –​I’ve worked on productions with a mix of able-​bodied and disabled actors. But now, for the first 258

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time, I will be performing with a full cast of actors with varying forms of disability in RARE Theatre’s After the Blackout. This realization gave me pause. Why is it that I have had little experience working with other actors with disabilities? Why is there such a lack of representation when it comes to the stage and screen? Amponsah’s question is yet another reminder of the ways in which Canadian disability drama must be understood in relation to broader disability theatre practice and precepts. Further, while Amponsah and Kadoura’s podcast discussion centred on physical disabilities and theatre, it is important to note that Canada has been home to a number of disability theatre companies and other initiatives focused on a range of disability experiences. Toronto’s Workman Arts (formerly Workman Arts Theatre Project), for example, has been fostering the theatre work of artists with lived mental illness and/​or addiction experiences since 1987. During this time, they have developed and/​or produced over forty plays written from the perspective of people who have lived experience of mental illness and/​or addiction. They also initiated the Madness and Arts World Festival, held at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre in 2003, which featured theatre groups and artists with goals akin to their own from around the world. They then toured their productions to the next iterations of these festivals in Germany (2006) and the Netherlands (2010). Although their subjects and styles have varied greatly over time, a hallmark of many plays created at Workman Arts is how they use innovations in form to challenge long-​standing theatrical patterns that stigmatize mental illness experience. Canada is home to several other long-​standing and important companies with decades of experience fostering the drama of disabled theatre artists. A  highly influential example is Calgary’s Stage Left Productions, led by Artistic Director Michele Decottignies and best known internationally for the searing production, Mercy Killing or Murder: The Tracy Latimer Story (2003). This play sought to redress an imbalance in the media coverage of the landmark Canadian legal case centred on Robert Latimer, a man who in 1993 killed his twelve-​year-​old daughter, Tracy, a child with cerebral palsy who experienced seizures as well as severe mental and physical disabilities. Noting the near absence of disabled voices in the public debates and media coverage of Tracy’s murder, the play centred around disabled people’s perspectives and the role the media can play in making sure that disabled people are heard as valued, human citizens. The published version and supporting discussion in Canadian Theatre Review (2003) provides details of the many ways that the company imbricated access into the development and production process, seeking to ensure that the voices of disabled people were front and centre for audiences. Another long-​standing disability theatre company is Vancouver’s Theatre Terrific. Since 1985 it has fostered the playwriting and theatre practice of disabled artists. One of their plays, The Glass Box (2009) devised by Kyla Harris, Watson Moy and Susanna Uchatius was recently included in leading Canadian performance scholar Erin Hurley’s Once More, With Feeling: Five Affecting Plays (2014). The Glass Box is particularly remarkable for its direct, sometimes playful and sometimes searing, interrogations of disabled sexualities. Drawing both from real-​ life experience and invention, the three main characters perform as fictionalized versions of themselves as well as their famously hyper-​sexualized alter egos: respectively, Cleopatra, Brad Pitt and Sophia Loren. In her introduction to the play, Allison Leadley notes how Harris’s character holds a binder with “standardized criteria” that she references to keep score of the various ways each character answers questions under the bright lights of the glass box and celebrity tell-​all style game show (154). Many of the questions turn on what Leadley describes as “inquiries about their past sexual encounters, their desires for future sexual experiences, and their expectations of romantic partnerships” and their responses are measured by a “scoring system (with points 259

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for personal grooming, bodily functions, musical taste, disposition, loyalty, and expected life span) as well as ‘the rules for rehabilitation after trauma’ (these include instructions to ‘enjoy the process,’ maintain ‘realistic expectations,’ and prepare the body before sex)” (152). Read against Creeps, the play is remarkable for its mingling of diverse disability experiences, frank discussions of sexuality from male and female perspectives and playfulness with profoundly public spaces rather than private bathrooms. Familiar currents from Creeps, however, are evident in the characters’ attention to disabled bodies’ most basic functions, fierce rejection of belittling assumptions about disabled people’s worth and blunt challenges to the normative and medical model framings of the body found in the binder. While Theatre Terrific, Stage Left and Workman Arts have sometimes involved artists who have Deaf experience, this has not been a major focus of activity. It is important to note that Canada does not yet have a National Theatre for the Deaf akin to that in the US. However, several important artists are active in the field. In 2016, writer Adam Pottle’s play Ultrasound was brought to the stage by Cahoots Theatre and Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille. On his website, Pottle explains that the play considered “the consequences of eugenics through the Deaf experience, and asks the question, ‘in what circumstances would someone not want a child because it was normal?’.” The drama follows a couple as they attempt to conceive a child and debate whether they would prefer to have a Deaf or hearing child. Audiences attending the production had access to ASL from the moment of their arrival at the theatre and the play was performed in English and ASL with surtitle captions above the stage and projections enriching the storytelling throughout. In fact, the production inspired Cahoots Theatre to develop and share the Deaf Artists and Theatre Toolkit (DATT), a free online resource described on the Cahoots Theatre website as aiming to serve “as a resource and guide to increase innovative collaborations between professional theatre companies and Deaf artists as well as to increase engagement with Deaf audiences.” Actor Chris Dodd, cast as the play’s Deaf male lead, Alphonse, has also sought to improve theatre opportunities for Deaf audiences and artists, founding in 2017 Edmonton’s annual Sound/​Off Festival, a national event showcasing Deaf performing arts. Seeing Voices in Montreal is another hub aimed at building theatre and other professional opportunities for Deaf/​deaf community, a group they describe on their website as including “Deaf, hard-​of-​ hearing, orally Deaf, and deafened people.” The group has produced two musicals and in 2018 hosted a conference entitled “Awakening Deaf Theatre in Canada” which brought US and Canadian artists together to learn and plan together. As the many plays and initiatives cited above suggest, contemporary play development happens in conjunction with disability arts and cultural activism and innovation in the theatre sectors. In a 2017 article entitled “From Republicans to Hacktivists: Recent Inclusion Initiatives in Canadian Theatre,” I argued that the 2015 and 2016 seasons were something of a watershed moment for these efforts and disability theatre practice in Canada. Several professional theatre and national funding institutions joined with disabled theatre artists to re-​imagine how theatre might be developed, funded and produced in accessible and inclusive ways. Much of the early work had been led by grassroots initiatives and passionate individual artists operating without the benefit of targeted national, financial and infrastructural support. In 2008, however, the Canada Council for the Arts hired disability arts and culture activists Rose Jacobson and Geoff McMurchy to research disability arts. Their 2009 report, Focus on Disability and Deaf Arts in Canada, as well as its updated version in 2011, helped to move the council’s overall strategic plan in the direction of greater Deaf and disability arts support, efforts they continue to research and implement today. In addition, from 2016–​17, Canada’s National Arts Centre English Theatre, co-​curated by Sarah Garton Stanley and Syrus Marcus Ware, brought together artists, activists, research and cultural leaders through a two-​year cycle of events entitled Deaf, Disability and 260

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Mad Arts:  Changing the Shape of Canadian Theatre. Two highly successful playwrights, Jan Derbyshire and Alex Bulmer, were among the many artists making valuable contributions at these and other such culturally galvanizing events in this period. Although they are far from the only contributors, both have shared valuable ideas about disability theatre dramaturgy and infrastructure over time. With the leadership of playwright, dramaturg and Inclusive Design expert Jan Derbyshire, in 2015,Vancouver’s Playwrights Theatre Centre (PTC) created the ACK Lab. Supported by a Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America Bly Creative Capacity grant as well as a Canada Council Leadership for Change grant, the PTC ACK Lab aimed to challenge conventional theatre and dramaturgical practices. Derbyshire claims the phrase “flipping the familiar,” as a central animating principle for her work and in her 2016 Theatre Research in Canada article, “Infrequently Asked Questions, or:  How to Kickstart Conversations Around Inclusion and Accessibility in Canadian Theatre and Why it Might be Good for Everybody,” she explains this idea further: In theatre this manifests as a driving obsession to look for artistic practices and models that work well for institutes, companies, and creators and ask: is this the way you’ve always done things? It’s a good question to start the rock rolling on issues of diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. (263) So many of Derbyshire and PTC’s infrequently asked questions find connections both to Stroker’s and Hansen’s call for basic access, as well as the animating principles of disability arts and cultural activism in Canadian theatre. Freeman detailed the material disabling forces of the charitable model of disability. So too the recent initiatives centre on artistic practice and reject fully any sense of the charitable model explored in Creeps. Rather, these questions, calls for reform and innovative creative practices all aim to put disabled people at the centre of theatre creation, while also acknowledging theatre’s long histories of inaccessibility and disabling traditions. For these reasons, Derbyshire connects the ACK Lab name to hacker culture, where everything isn’t made from scratch but rather pieces of know-​how and tools are repurposed to achieve something new. We quickly realized that trying to work with specific writer’s needs and ways of working is already a long-​held principle of skilled dramaturgy. What we didn’t understand was how much the physical world would affect the needs of our artists’ preferred way of working. (267) Practically, for example, Derbyshire noted how granting agencies’ typically intensive timelines are not often aligned with the temporal needs of disabled artists. What would it mean if dramaturgy workshop times were designed around specific disabled artists’ travel, labour and creative requirements? Moreover, what might the best practices be to insure that disabled actors and other theatre artists have the opportunity to join the workshop process fully? PTC used their annual Writers’ Colony as a testing ground for their questions and focused their efforts to support disabled playwrights Heidi Janz, Janet Hinton and Adam Grant Warren. For Derbyshire, a primary goal of this 2015 session was to make sure Janz, Hinton and Warren had the opportunity to work with professional designers early in their process because she felt too many disabled playwrights only ever get to work with shoestring budgets and do not get to experience what full production design can bring to the creative process, especially in the workshop rather than the production phase. 261

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Most recently at time of writing, Derbyshire performed her play Certified at Vancouver’s Cultch Theatre whose website promoted it as follows: Comedian and certified insane person Jan Derbyshire turns the audience into a mental health review board to help determine her current state of sanity. Join the irreverent fun of Jan’s hilarious and heart-​aching journey through the mental health system. Together, we grapple with hefty questions like: how do we define “crazy” and who gets to decide? In this case: you do. A highly participatory event with a narrative arc that oscillates between hilarious and harrowing autobiographical details, Certified is an expertly crafted performance and exploration of legal, medical, philosophical and disability-​led discourses concerning the concepts of sanity and insanity. Derbyshire has toured the play to many places including, earlier in 2019, the FoldA: Festival of Live Digital Arts held in June 2019 at Kingston, Ontario. In this context, Derbyshire livestreamed the play so that remote audiences could participate online. Although the FoldA events were not solely focused on disability arts, there were efforts to be inclusive and accessible. A  further livestreamed FoldA event which included disabled performers was entitled, “Unsettling Dramaturgy: Crip and Indigenous Process Design in the Studio, on the Stage.” Here, an international complement of artists participated live and online in discussions aimed at exploring and articulating the best decolonizing, accessible and inclusive dramaturgical protocols and practices. Such discussions are critical for the development of the field.The digital facilitation, international participation, inclusion of a broad spectrum of disabled experiences and intersectional conversations suggested exciting futures, as yet imagined either in the discussion of art in the bathroom in Creeps or in the design of the 2019 Tony awards. Playwright, actor, director, dramaturg, vocal trainer and disability arts and cultural activist Alex Bulmer has worked professionally both in Canada and the UK. A self-​described “blind theatre artist and inclusive arts consultant,” like Derbyshire, Bulmer’s most recent creative and activist efforts in 2019 were also featured at FoldA and then later in Vancouver, in Bulmer’s case at the Theatre and Accessibility in a Digital World conference sponsored by the Canada Council and co-​produced by Vancouver’s ArtsClub and Bard on the Beach theatres. In both places, she presented May I Take Your Arm?, a tactile immersive performance installation that she developed with Red Dress Productions. The latter’s web page cites a key question behind the production: “If we walk together, does the way we ‘see’ our neighbourhood change?” Building from the stories shared by neighbours whose arms Bulmer took to get to know her Toronto neighbourhood better, the show mingled pre-​recorded audio, live performance, live-​streamed video, live audience participation and miniature, tactile (some edible!) sets and properties to represent the key sites of the neighbourhood tours. Designed to be interesting for blind audiences and others, on the Red Dress Productions company website the artists explain that the production aimed to explore “interdependence, relationships between people, our relationship to the St. James Town and Cabbagetown neighbourhoods in Toronto, and the land upon which these neighbourhoods are settled.” Bulmer’s work on this project and its explicit connectedness to the land is striking in view of her trajectory and past works. In 2000, Bulmer’s now twice-​published play, Smudge, was first produced, like Creeps, at Tarragon Theatre and nominated for the same Floyd S. Chalmers award that Freeman had won in 1971 as well as Toronto Dora Award for Best New Writing and Best Production (Bulmer, “Smudge,” 67). A  one-​act play for three actors, it traces the romantic, medical and comedic escapades of Freddie, a woman who, like Bulmer, experiences vision loss. With a long history in theatre both before and after her vision loss, Smudge played a critical role in Bulmer’s artistic 262

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development: “Writing the play made me realize –​and fear –​how much I love theatre, which I’ve been drawn to my whole life. I thought my connection with the arts was over when my sight disappeared, but I’ve survived. It’s been vital to write about it, to reproduce it as a useful experience” (qtd. in Kaplan). Moving between the UK and Canada to find and advocate for better disabled access to the arts both on-​and offstage, Bulmer has worked with Graeae Theatre, Channel Four and the BBC in the UK as well as Toronto’s Cripping the Stage and Picasso Project. She first left Toronto due to the profound inaccessibility she experienced in the arts sector once she began to lose her vision. As she explained to interviewer Diane Flacks in 2009, however, through Graeae and the UK’s Access to Work program, she was able to work and develop professionally and produced a significant body of work. She returned to Toronto in 2008 to help with the collaborative project The Book of Judith, a play that featured disabled and non-​disabled performers and turned around the late inclusion activist Judith Snow. Since that time, Bulmer has been involved in many efforts to improve theatre access onstage and off for disabled, Deaf and Mad people. However, writing about one such initiative, the 2015 Republic of Inclusion in Toronto, she expressed ambivalent feelings about having to keep doing this work: “with so much exposure to inclusive practice in the UK, contrasted with so little yet in practice to liberate participation in Toronto, I felt, and often do feel in Canada, like a pulled sling shot held permanently back in grip (a rather poetic description of how it can feel when disabled)” (Bulmer, “Inclusion,” 261). For Bulmer, the strongest means for releasing this grip and building inclusion are desire and resilience: “to not only create desire but also to protect it, and thus to engender resilience” (262). In Creeps, Freeman showed us desire:

Jim:  I want to be a writer Car son:  (To Sam and Pete)    Quit fooling around, and hurry up Jim:  I want to be a writer! Car son: You are a writer. Jim: You don’t understand. I want to make my living from it. Car son:  Maybe you will, some day. But it’s not going to happen overnight, is it? Tom:  If you stay here, Jim, it won’t happen at all. (37) Perhaps it is this spark of desire at the play’s narrative core and Freeman’s own evident resilience in bringing it to the stage so many decades ago that accounts for Creeps’ continuing resonance with some artists and audiences. Certainly, the field of Canadian disability drama produced since then is rich, varied, complex, powerful and compelling but there are without question thousands of further sling shots (held back by far more than absent stage ramps and inaccessible bathrooms) with the potential to impact the stage in much-​needed and exciting ways.

Works cited Albert, Lyle Victor. Scraping the Surface: Three Plays by Lyle Victor Albert. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2000. Amponsah,Prince.“Disability,Represented.”Intermission Magazine. 9 May 2018.www.intermissionmagazine. ca/​author/​prince-​amponsah/​. Barr, Elinor. “Sven Börje Johansson.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada:  2019. www. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/​en/​article/​sven-​borje-​johansson. 2015. Bulmer, Alex. “Inclusion: Building a Culture of Desire and Resilience.” Theatre Research in Canada, vol. 37, no. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 260–​265. —​—​—​. “Smudge.” Canadian Theatre Review, no. 108, Fall 2001, pp. 52–​67. Cahoots Theatre. http://​cahoots.ca/​datt/​. n.d.

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Kirsty Johnston Campbell, Jane and Mike Oliver. Disability Politics: Understanding Our Past, Changing Our Future. 1996. Routledge, 2013. Canada Council.https://​canadacouncil.ca/​research/​research-l​ ibrary/2​ 018/0​ 5/d​ eaf-a​ nd-d​ isability-a​ rts. n.d. Dacre, Kathy and Alex Bulmer.“Into the Scene and Its Impact on Inclusive Performance Training.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, vol. 14, no. 1, Feb. 2009, pp. 133–​139. Decottignies, Michele. “Mercy Killing or Murder: The Tracy Latimer Story.” Canadian Theatre Review, no. 122, Spring 2005, pp. 67–​88. Derbyshire, Jan. “Infrequently Asked Questions, or:  How to Kickstart Conversations Around Inclusion and Accessibility in Canadian Theatre and Why it Might be Good for Everybody.” Theatre Research in Canada, vol. 37, no. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 263–​269. —​—​—​. Certified. Performed by Jan Derbyshire, Cultch Theatre,Vancouver, 3–​16 Nov. 2019. Flacks, Diane. “Having Cultivated Her Talent Abroad, Alex Bulmer Plants Her Creative Seed Here.” Toronto Star, 26 May 2009. Folda.ca. www.folda.ca/​event/​may-​i-​take-​your-​arm/​. n.d. —​—​—​. www.folda.ca/​event/​certified/​. n.d. Freeman, David. Creeps. University of Toronto Press, 1972. Johnston, Kirsty. “From Republicans to Hacktivists:  Recent Inclusion Initiatives in Canadian Theatre.” Research in Drama Education:  The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, vol. 22, no. 3, 2017, pp. 352–​362. —​—​—​. “Introduction: Performance and Disability.” Theatre Research in Canada, vol. 37, no. 2, Fall 2016, pp. 151–​156. Kadoura,Yousef. www.walkingthespace.com. n.d. Kaplan, Jon. “Alex Bulmer’s Groundbreaking Smudge Goes Inside the Mind’s Eye. Sight Unseen.” Now Magazine, 16 Nov. 2000. Kerr, Kevin. Skydive.Vancouver: Talonbooks,  2010. Leadley, Allison. https://​brocku.ca/​diversities-​in-​actor-​training/​artists/​#allison. —​—​—​. “Introduction to The Glass Box by Theatre Terrific.” In Once More with Feeling: Five Affecting Plays, edited by Erin Hurley, Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2014, pp. 149–​194. Lewis, Victoria Ann. Beyond Victims and Villains:  Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights. Theatre Communications Group, 2006. Paulson, Michael. “Ali Stroker on Winning the Tony: ‘I Was Meant to Be in This Seat’.” New York Times, 12 June 2019. Picard, Andre. “Vancouver Airport Wins New Hansen Prize.” The Globe and Mail, 12 June 2004. Pottle, Adam. http://​adampottle.com. n.d. Realwheels. Realwheels.ca. n.d. Red Dress Productions. https://​reddressproductions.org/​current-​projects/​may-​i-​take-​your-​arm/​. n.d. Salam, Maya. “Ali Stroker Makes History as First Wheelchair User to Win Tony.” The New York Times, 9 June 2019. Sandahl, Carrie. “The Tyranny of Neutral: Disability and Actor Training.” In Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, edited by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, University of Michigan Press, 2005, pp. 255–​267. Seeing Voices Montreal. www.seeingvoicesmontreal.com/​awakening-​conference. n.d. Shain, Alan. Time to Put My Socks On. Perf. Alan Shain. Big Secret Theatre, Calgary. 2–​5 December 2009. Warren, Adam Grant. “The Long, Loud Resonance of Creeps.” 6 March 2018. Spider Web Show Performance. 10 June 2019. Wasserman, Jerry. “Review:  Creeps Remains a Powerful Inside View of the Disabled.” Vancouver Sun, 2 December 2016. Workman Arts. www.workmanarts.com. n.d.

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22 DISABILITY AND THE AMERICAN STAGE MUSICAL Samuel Yates

Broadway musicals are an art form and industry that rely on “triple-​threat” performers with exceptional skills in acting, dance, and music  –​as well as stamina  –​to consistently execute as many as nine performances a week. An able body is at the center of musical theatre performance yet disabled characters are everywhere in the musical theatre genre: conjoined twins dancing on vaudeville stages; wheelchair users longing to walk; chronic illnesses threatening death; even Dorothy’s traveling companions in Oz lack brains, heart, and nerve –​parts vital for bodily functions. More recently, these generic expectations pressuring the human body were underscored by theatre artists and critics when Ali Stroker, the first wheelchair-​using actor on Broadway, appeared in Deaf West’s 2015 Revival of Spring Awakening. In a production where the primary means of communication is the physical grammar of American Sign Language, it was the visual presence of Stroker’s chair that marked her as nonnormative –​atypical, disabled –​ and challenged prioritizations of the conventional dance and physical movement vocabularies musicals are built upon. Now, theatre scholars and practitioners are debating the merits of diversifying casting with disabled performers and critiquing representations of disability by able-​bodied actors. In disability studies, scholars have transferred the logic of the disability rights rallying cry “Nothing about us without us!” to the field’s contact points with performance studies by providing a disability-​as-​performance framework (Charlton 3–​4). This scholarship foregrounds the performances of everyday life disabled persons enact, art-​framed work by disabled performers, and the disability metaphors organizing narrative and imagery in dramatic literature (Kuppers 2003 and 2017; Sandahl and Auslander 2005; Johnston 2016). Music theatre scholars invested in identity-​oriented approaches have argued embodied difference carries epistemological and material weight during encounters in live performance, but this material turn towards the body leaves disability’s relationship the genre itself unaddressed (Fox 2015; Knapp 2015; Sternfeld 2015; Wolf 2011). As a result, current scholarship foregrounds disability in musical theatre as either a “narrative prosthesis,” David T.  Mitchell and Sharon L.  Snyder’s formulation of the use of disability “throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight,” or it is a battleground for equitable industry and cultural representation (50). Such projects offer actionable solutions for diversifying individual theatrical productions but without an adequate analysis of how musical

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theatre –​as a genre and as an industry –​is built around expectations of able-​bodied performance little headway can be made towards implementing change. This chapter does not seek to provide a comprehensive history of all disabilities informing the American stage musical.1 That project is nearly impossible without acquiring or claiming knowledge of individual writers and performers’ personal relationship to disability, which would require either compelled medical disclosures or inaccurate armchair diagnoses. Both pathologize difference and reify the able body in harmful, damaging ways. Instead, I offer a brief history detailing the emergence of the able-​bodied triple-​threat performer and discuss two primary modes of disability representation in musical theatre: narrative prosthesis, or a dependency on metaphors of disability, and disabilities woven into the fabric of a character and plot that compel physical performance onstage –​what I am calling diegetic disabilities. This leaves significant issues unaddressed, including the reductive conflation of disparate disabilities, a dearth of artistic training for disabled actors, and the dire state of disability access in many professional theatres. Acknowledging these gaps, this chapter is intended to open conversations regarding the organization of musical theatre around the able body and begin to answer how and why disability is a significant concern of the American stage musical.

The triple-​threat performer Book writers, librettists, composers, choreographers, directors, critics, and fans imagine actors in musical theatre to be exceptionally able-​bodied:  a performer must have a keen memory for lines of dialogue, an intuitive skill for conveying social relationships with affective nuance, a good ear for music and voice trained to withstand the rigors of singing scores for multiple hours each day, the coordination and muscle memory to participate in complex stage blocking and choreography, and the intellectual stability to complexly realize the life of a character and still maintain her own social life outside of the theatre.This constellation of excellence in acting, dancing, and music –​commonly referred to as a “triple-​threat” –​while invested in the historical expression of the musical theatre art form that emerged from vaudeville variety shows in the early twentieth century, is predicated on expectations of the performer’s bodily congruity with a kind of exceptionalism or athletic productivity. Why is it that we do not expect to find disabilities on the Broadway stage? Assumptions that all disabled people are chronically “unwell,” and the expectation that if a disabled performer is capable of offering a high-​octane, enjoyable performance she must somehow be “faking it,” undergirds the logic of many producers, artists, and audiences. One reason for this is the anticipation of bodies functioning only as described by a medical diagnosis (one element of what is, in disability studies, called the medical model of disability); another is the government-​ perpetuated trope of the “welfare queen” who fraudulently collects disability payments without being “really disabled.” Both stigmatize disability and police its public expression. However, disability and questions regarding the proper limits of human capability have been addressed onstage since what is often considered to be the American stage musical’s earliest moment: the 1866 production of The Black Crook. Produced at Niblo’s Garden, the five-​hour spectacle was a combination of ballet, music, and other entertainments organized around a traditional melodramatic plot written by Charles M. Barras. Amina and Rodolphe are lovers but the jealous Count Wolfenstein wants Amina for himself, so he devises a plan with Hertzog –​a crookbacked wizard who provides the devil with new souls in exchange for eternal life –​to sacrifice Rodolphe to the demon Zamiel.This mutually beneficial deal would remove Rodolphe as Wolfenstein’s competition for Amina’s affections and provide Herzog with his annual sacrifice. Through a series of (mis)adventures Rodolphe 266

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escapes with the help of a fairy queen to be reunited with his love, while Wolfenstein is defeated and Herzog is condemned to hell since he cannot fulfill his Faustian bond. Although, as Ethan Mordden argues, The Black Crook “wasn’t the first anything and wasn’t even a musical,” the production is nonetheless a functional benchmark due to its box office success while combining melodramatic plot, music, and spectacle (15). As such, its depiction of Hertzog marks a starting point for our understanding of disability in the American stage musical. A production note in The Black Crook’s 1866 prompt book notes that as the titular “Black Crook” of the spectacular, “Hertzog is a hideous deformity, with leaden complexion, humped-​ back, knotted limbs, crooked body and lame” (Barras 3). Made “lame” by his “crooked body,” Hertzog is apparently unwell. His disability marks his turpitude –​an iteration of the trope of the villain’s distorted nature manifesting itself in his outward appearance. Hertzog’s “black” hue and “leaden complexion” would have been classically regarded as an indicator of a melancholic temperament, first classified by the Greek physician-​philosopher Hippocrates as a component of humorism and still referenced throughout the nineteenth century. Today, melancholia adds an additional dimension to the mental health concerns explored in this piece, as it is considered a depressive mode. It would be difficult not to read this note as offering racial markers although there is no evidence that C.H. Morton, who originated Hertzog, was a nonwhite actor or to suggest he played the role with minstrel stylizations (“Playbill”). As a melodramatic villain, then, his blackened coloring quickly distinguishes him amid the spectacular’s colorful surroundings. Significantly, the phrasing of the note does not say Hertzog has a deformity; Hertzog himself is the deformity. The descriptor “hideous” is as much a design specification for the costumer as it an aspect that should inform the director’s blocking and other actors’ responses in order to elicit a desired aesthetic judgement from the audience. Together, Hertzog’s nonnormative coloring, awkward physical movements, and “crooked” silhouette create a hideously disabled man, which presumably makes his quest for immortality all the more audacious. His body is not only figured as disabled. It is important that Hertzog also transgresses human nature in his quest for an unnaturally long life; the latter action presumably forecloses sympathy for or empathy with the aging wizard. This strategic management will be significant to my discussion of diegetic disabilities later in this chapter; for now, however, we must remember Morton’s portrayal of Hertzog’s disability would be received as heroically virtuosic –​a predecessor of contemporary expectations on the triple-​threat performer. “Triple-​threat” is now a staple theatre term signifying excellence in singing, acting, and dancing, but its origins come from another discipline that prizes able-​bodied prowess: American football. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes its first use to W.H. Baumer’s 1939 text Sports as Taught & Played at West Point. Baumer uses “triple-​threat” to indicate an individual players’ skill in running, passing, and punting; the phrase was clearly already in common parlance, as I have found it in newspapers sports columns as early as 1916 (“Football”). By the late 1930s the phrase crossed over into the performing arts, although it still connoted being multiply skilled. A  November 1937 review of the Victor Schertzinger-​directed musical comedy Something To Sing About describes Evelyn Daw as a “triple-​threat leading lady who sings, dances and acts” (“Cagney”), and the phrase was deployed less than a year later as a pun in George Ross’ article “In New York”: “Overheard at a local nightspot: ‘She’s a triple-​threat entertainer. She can’t sing, she can’t dance, she can’t act.’ ” (7). Ross’ joke plays more on the idea of the entertainer being a “threat” due to the unnamed actresses’ multiple deficiencies. Though set in opposition; their wordplay on “triple-​threat” realizes an expectation of the exceptionally able-​bodied, skilled performer. In 1941 the term was nationally concretized in Life magazine. The now-​ iconic August 11th edition showcases Rita Hayworth on the cover, relaxing on a beach while wearing a two-​piece bathing suit, and inside, a nearly-​full page photograph of Hayworth in a 267

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form-​fitting negligee, kneeling “on her own bed in her own home” (33). These images, styled to highlight Hayworth’s physical fitness, aesthetic beauty, and presumed sexual availability, are accompanied by the headline “Rita Hayworth Rises from Bit Parts into a Triple-​Threat Song and Dance Star.” Proclamations of Daw and Hayworth’s skill, accompanied by photographic evidence of their virtuosic fit bodies, underscore the connection between audience optics and able-​bodied performance burgeoning at the beginning the 1940s  –​Broadway’s Golden Era. Now, telegraphing personal health and physical ability are calling cards for contemporary Broadway performers. The economic consolidation of roles that would, in earlier decades, have been filled by many actors instead of one is predicated on the physical ability of the single, virtuosic performer. This shift in casting practices is predicated on two principles: smaller casts (and therefore lower production costs) and physical fitness. Actors, singers, and dancers have long been frowned upon when they openly acknowledge the physical taxation of their work. Complaint goes against the performance subculture embracing injury, pain, and tolerance in deference to the appearance of physical prowess; it puts an individual at danger of losing her job; and potentially results in an actors’ physiological “disruption of self ” when she is unable to perform the triple-​threat ideal (Mainwaring et al. 105). The athletic coding of the triple-​threat is not limited to the theatre; ESPN Sports Science, for example, recently collaborated on a series of biometric studies with cast members in Disney’s The Lion King (2016). The results measured actors against top professional athletes, and found their power and agility to be comparable or better: dancer Lamar Baylor spins 35 percent faster than the Dallas Cowboy running back Ezekiel Elliot, while India Bolds covers an average distance of 2.68 miles per show –​more than NBA all-​star Steph Curry’s game average in the 2015–​16 season (Cingari). The rhetoric of athleticism is not arbitrarily imposed:  it is deeply ingrained in artistic subcultures in which Broadway actors position themselves as triple-​threat performer closer to the football player of the phrase’s origins than the artist we might expect. In a November 2016 episode of the popular musical theatre podcast The Ensemblist, actor Pearl Sun describes the taxing work of performing the leading role of bipolar Diana Goodman in Next to Normal (2009): “It becomes a marathon –​you really have to pace yourself in a different way, to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself when you’re not onstage, so that you can pull that out eight times a week” (Brady and Lanzarone). Given the training, repetition, pacing, and stamina it takes to perfect and perform onstage for three hours eight times a week, the metaphor of running a marathon is not a particularly surprising one. For Cynthia Erivo, Celie in the 2015 revival of The Color Purple, the actor “should stay fit for the job, not let the job make [her] fit.” She explains: “If your body is working correctly and then you get a cold or something, that cold probably won’t knock you out as hard as it would have if you weren’t healthy. Keep yourself fit and you’ll be able to do the job” (Moseley). Of course, Erivo may be an exception –​the actor ran the 2016 Brooklyn half-​marathon in 1 hour, 48 minutes, and then performed Saturday’s matinee and evening performances (Stewart). Why should a discussion of disability in musical theatre first grapple with able-​bodied triple-​ threats? The ableism structuring commercial theatre practices must be included in our analysis of how disability operates in Broadway musicals because the able body is the illusory norm dictating how roles are written, performed, and received. Ableism sets the stage for tropes of dis-​ease with disease, institutionalization, inspiration-​porn, and disposability to be unchecked, exploited, and reiterated. In theorizing the triple-​threat as a hyper-​able performer, one stumbling block I must acknowledge is that the individual actor may in fact have various nonvisible disabilities and/​or chronic illnesses shaping their performance. What to make of the exceedingly capable triple-​threat actor who may have a nonvisible disability related to information 268

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processing, hearing, sight, or any number of other vectors? How do disability aesthetics work in and against the economic unit of the triple-​threat? Drawing attention to the paradox the triple-​ threat performers enacting disability highlights the potential for disability aesthetics to undo and rebuild the “world of the play,” generating new dramatic texts and theatrical performances with nuanced, inclusive, disability representations, dreams, politics, and language. It is more difficult –​but realistic –​then, to view access to alternative bodyminds as the musical’s radical cripistemological move: breaking material and affective barriers by sharing in live performances, generating shared experiences in specific geographic and sociopolitical contexts: “This reiteration builds worlds. It proliferates ‘reals,’ or what I call worlds, and establishes the groundwork for potential oppositional counterpublics” (Muñoz 196).

Disability as a metaphor The most common example of disability in musical theatre is a rhetorical invocation in musicals in which there are otherwise no disabled characters at all. We can easily find examples of ableist language in everyday speech: a movie may be “lame,” a highway can be “crippled” by a snowstorm, your “psycho” neighbor or co-​worker, and many more besides. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear characters in musicals using similar language; the stage is a refraction of our own reality. Such examples are usually intentionally benign, which is to say that we are so desensitized to the use of disability as a referent point that disablement is frequently not an intended insult but, instead, reveals some aspect of an able-​bodied character’s nature or action. The problem with such references is that they linguistically reinforce and disseminate a hierarchical preference for able bodies and normative cognition over disabled and neurodiverse persons. Librettos commonly use disability metaphors as a shorthand for understanding love. Musicals with ostensibly healthy, able-​bodied characters like April, Cathy, and Marta in Company (1970) and Bobby in Crazy For You (1992) sing familiar invocations of the love-​as-​madness or “lovesick” tropes in “You Could Drive A Person Crazy” and “K-​ra-​zy For You,” respectively. Even in productions with visibly disabled characters, such as the 2014 revival of Side Show, disabilities describe the recognition of love: conjoined twins Daisy and Violet use other forms of physical disablement to articulate their affections for Terry and Buddy after receiving their first kiss. Daisy sings how “nothing they’re saying /​is catching my ear” while Violet proclaims, “And I’m virtually blind /​No more room in my mind” –​all because “He kissed me” (Russell et al. 62). The ableism entrenched in these metaphors is arguably easier to find when disabled characters sing them. In Side Show’s original 1997 Broadway script The Boss sings “Crazy, Deaf, and Blind,” before the Hiltons incorporate these words into their own vocabularies. The idea of crazy, deaf, of blind uses mental illness and sensory disabilities to explicitly privilege able-​bodiedness. In Stephen Schwartz and Joseph Stein’s The Baker’s Wife (1989), Geneviève is a young and flighty wife of the much-​older baker, Aimable Castagnet. Although the musical never ran on Broadway, despite a strong cult following, Geneviève’s Act I song “Meadowlark” is popular in audition rooms, concert circuits, and cabarets. At a pivotal point in the first act when Geneviève considers leaving her husband, Aimable, for the younger, handsome chauffeur Dominique, she recalls a tale from her childhood: WHEN I WAS A GIRL, I HAD A FAVORITE STORY OF THE MEADOWLARK WHO LIVED WHERE THE RIVERS WIND HER VOICE COULD MATCH THE ANGELS’ IN ITS GLORY BUT SHE WAS BLIND, THE LARK WAS BLIND (Schwartz and Stein 53) 269

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Geneviève sees herself as the blinded meadowlark, applying the fate of blind bird and its death to her own life. Disability scholars Mitchell and Snyder have framed invocations of disability like the kind Geneviève sings as a narrative prosthesis, a “crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight” (49). Theatrical performance is not a literary narrative Mitchell and Snyder explicitly explore in Narrative Prosthesis:  Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000), but we might think of the contemporary book musical as doing similar work through the integrated libretto and score. Book musicals use song to advance the plot, and in The Baker’s Wife “Meadowlark” is not simply a citationally reflexive expression of Geneviève’s inner life –​she contemplates the fate of the blind meadowlark and uses the song to arrive at the decision to leave Amiable for Dominique as the number builds towards to its final, triumphant crescendo. Geneviève, recalling the lark’s death after refusing the sun god’s offer, sees herself as the meadowlark and rescripts the story at the critical moment of decision-​making –​the lark feels a sense of duty to stay with the old king but Geneviève decides to “fly away” with her “beautiful young man” Dominique.While her decision reveals how blindness functions as a representational shorthand for the audience and an analytic tool for Geneviève, it also demonstrates the “disruptive potentiality” Mitchell and Snyder describe. Geneviève, perhaps willfully, misunderstands the meadowlark’s death: BUT THE MEADOWLARK SAID NO FOR THE OLD KING LOVED HER SO SHE COULDN’T BEAR TO WOUND HIS PRIDE SO THE SUN GOD FLEW AWAY AND WHEN THE KING CAME DOWN THAT DAY HE FOUND HIS MEADOWLARK HAD DIED EVERY TIME I HEARD THAT PART I CRIED… (Schwartz and Stein 54) In the context of her decision to leave Amiable for Dominique, Geneviève’s interpretation of the childhood fable makes it seem as though the lark dies of a broken heart after refusing the sun god. Her tears are not for the old king, who mourns the beloved lark upon his discovery of her death, but for the lark herself who has sacrificed a presumed happiness in duty to the king. The lyrics themselves, however, suggest that the covetous sun god kills the meadowlark for her refusal of his advances to “dance on the coral beaches, [and] make a feast of the plums and peaches” (54). Given that the thought of wounding the king’s pride is the only thing the meadowlark “couldn’t bear” we can logically assume she could bear living without the sensuous pleasures the sun god offers. This means she does not die of a broken heart, as Geneviève interprets, which only leaves the possibility of the god’s jealous rage. Thus, blindness is not only a “crutch” the audience relies upon to understand the baker’s wife’s inner life or an analytic tool for Geneviève to work through her own given circumstance –​her misreading of the meadowlark’s story is, paradoxically, a kind of “blindness” at the moment when Geneviève is attempting to rewrite her own tale towards the curative, sighted, ending. This redoubling, Geneviève’s loss of control of the blindness metaphor, is one example of a narrative prosthesis’ “disruptive potentiality”: just as the disabled body cannot be standardized, for no two disability experiences are the same, so too a metaphorical disability cannot be narrowly controlled in the diegetic world. As Garland-​Thomson reminds us, disability “demands a reckoning with the messiness of bodily variety, with literal individuation run amok,” whereby it “signals that the body cannot be universalized” (24–​25). Lyricist Stephen Schwartz’s blind meadowlark, while an effective storytelling tool, highlights how disability cannot be simply 270

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inscribed in traditional curative arcs without a disruptive “messiness” that runs alongside, or counter to, the character onstage’s objectives. In other words, Geneviève is the blind meadowlark of the story but not for the reasons she thinks. Her attempts to “cure” herself of her blindness by running away with Dominique calls attention to her own inability to see the truth in the story and her own situation. Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis “evolves out of this specific recognition: a narrative issues to resolve or correct –​to ‘prostheticize’ in David Wills’s sense of the term –​a deviance marked as improper to a social context” (53). Geneviève’s contemplation of leaving her husband would certainly be scandalous in the context of her small French town during the 1930s; her invocation of blindness is a reason and a corrective, though both fail under scrutiny. This simple example of how blindness is deployed in one song of The Baker’sWife demonstrates common issues of cultural representations of disability.The blind meadowlark is coded as passive and feminine against the masculine, able powers of the king and the sun god. More significant, the meadowlark is set into the traditional kill-​or-​cure narrative. This common plot “will often seem to ‘redeem’ a protagonist –​the death will be sacrificial or the cure will be credited to the hero” (Dolmage 39). While the meadowlark is praised for her virtuosic musical ability –​apparently so great that it calls the God of the Sun down to Earth from his celestial flight to restore her sight –​her cure is conditional on accepting the sun god’s invitation, which is a different kind of prison. Her death, figured as a sacrificial marker of love for the old king, obscures the seeming expendability of the meadowlark herself.This is but one of many disability metaphors that “run amok” during a musical number  –​transmitting images, language, practices, and assumptions about the disablement that complicate the universalizing generalizations of disability metaphors in musical lyrics.

Crip characters with diegetic disabilities Narrative prostheses are fundamentally different than disabilities woven into the musical’s diegesis, the plot as represented in the book and score. However ableist they may be, disability metaphors are effective tools for conveying sentiment precisely because they are commonly used in everyday speech. In actuality they perpetuate harmful stereotypes that not only co-​ opt disablement in service of the able-​bodied speaker, but this cooptation also obscures the condition(s) of the disability itself. Uttered by an able-​bodied character performed by an able-​ bodied actor, the disabled body never makes an appearance onstage. What I am calling “diegetic disabilities” are disabilities explicitly scripted into the book of a musical to be performed onstage. Even if the disability works as a narrative prosthesis (such as A Christmas Carol’s sickly disabled Tiny Tim), there is still a materially present body. This is a significant departure in a few key ways. First, it means that a diegetic disability is not a vehicle glossing an able-​bodied character’s experience, as I argue Geneviève’s meadowlark is scripted in The Baker’s Wife, but a lived condition that a character herself experiences. While the portrayal may be (and most commonly is) played by an able-​bodied actor, diegetic disabilities disallow any easy negation of disabled embodiment because once a disability is physically enacted onstage it becomes central to the vocabulary of the musical production. It is not a referent point for what a character is “actually” feeling because the disability itself is the apparent source of sensation. Second, diegetic disabilities open space for nonnormative embodiments to be considered as having equal if not greater value to the conveyance of a story and characters’ experience. Much like how a book musical integrates music and plot to advance characters –​one requires the other –​diegetic disabilities are central to the constellation of an individual character’s expression, plot arc, and identity. Third, and most significantly, diegetic disabilities in musicals offer 271

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valuable alternatives to the professionalization of the actors’ body. Given that musical theatre all but expects extraordinary abilities from its triple-​threat actors, the maximally productive body is thwarted by the disabled body. Encountering disabilities onstage challenge able-​bodied notions of what bodies are livable, marketable, healthy or well, capable, and desirable. A diegetic disability is preferential precisely because of its discoverability. If a disability is central to a character’s onstage presence it cannot be covered over, ignored, or translated into a shorthand for an able-​bodied character’s experience. Wicked’s Nessarose navigates the social experience of being a wheel-​chair user during a school dance; hunchedback Archibald Craven worries his son Colin has inherited his condition in The Secret Garden; Next to Normal’s Diana Goodman fights for autonomy over her own medical care; Clara is not good at “Statues and Stories” after her traumatic brain injury, no matter how hard she tries, in The Light in the Piazza. Regardless of whether the disability is considered incidental or central to the development of the musical’s plot, the disabled body ruptures expectations of how a body moves through the world of an American stage musical.What might it mean, then, to cast disabled actors as disabled characters? Or to reimagine conventionally able-​bodied characters as disabled?

Changing casting culture and representation As in film and on TV, it is common in Broadway musicals for able-​bodied actors to play disabled characters.Various terms for able-​bodied actors playing disabled roles circulate among disability rights activists, performers, and scholars: cripping up, crip-​face, disability drag, and cripcature. These phrases invoke contested histories of “blacking up” and blackface, gender drag, and caricature. When a character is physically disabled it widens the scope of actors perceived as “able” to perform a role. This, as many disabled actors anecdotally share, does not guarantee a disabled person will be cast over an able-​bodied performer. While acting is an art form predicated on the portrayal of someone other than oneself we do not think of Broadway actors Sutton Foster or Joshua Henry as playing “themselves” when they are playing roles written for white female or black male performers. Yet it seems this rhetoric of disabled actors “just playing themselves” is common with regards to disability representation –​not least because cripping up has long been a tactic for nondisabled performers to gain accolades. Just as there’s a particular embodied experience that comes with one’s physical age, sex, race, and gender identity, that we would assume for able-​bodied actors (an actor would generally not be cast to play an eighty-​year-​old cisgender, heterosexual black female from Detroit for a period drama if she does not have some base physical attributes), characters with disabilities can be portrayed by actors with disabilities with greater nuance and authenticity. If there were a great number of disabled actors being cast in disabled roles, or disabled actors being cast in roles traditionally imagined as able-​bodied, we could very well be having a different conversation about casting practices and the merits of calls for “authenticity” in acting. But that assumes there is already an even playing field in casting practices and representation, and that is simply not the case. To say “that’s what acting is” allows artistic inequities favoring able-​bodied actors and stereotypes about what disabled bodies do, or what disabilities are, to continue in film, television, stage, and other performance arts. Petra Kuppers (2014) suggests able-​bodied embodiment renders senses invisible –​individuals tend to only recognize embodiment through rupture (43). Chronic pain, heightened sensitivity or sensory absence, motor or mental modifications due to injury or biological development –​each ruptures the invisible continuity of the able body and, as Kuppers argues, “shifts the emphasis away from the body as object to embodiment as a process, a way of doing things” (44). One potential benefit of triple-​threats performing disabilities is that these performances 272

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pull actors and audiences outside of their typical embodiments to learn new affects, new ways of being and doing. This is not necessarily Brechtian  –​with politically alienated actors and audiences –​but the effect is not entirely dissimilar. “Disability,” Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson writes, “is the attribution of corporeal deviance –​not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do” (7). The separation she marks between bodily properties (what bodies are) and social mores what bodies “should be or do” (how bodies act) is crucial for understanding disability-​ in-​performance. Musical theatre is a rich site for understanding what we culturally think –​or believe to be true –​about what bodies are, based on how we script bodies to be or what to do onstage. In this way, theatrical staging becomes a framework for articulating disability as “corporeal deviance” from “cultural rules” (Garland-​Thomson 6–​9). Garland-​Thomson’s project is, in many ways, predicated on Spinoza’s question, “What can a body do?” but it also finds roots in Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion: We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body. (226) The generation and exchange of bodily knowledge Deleuze and Guattari describe results in a new “composition,” a body built upon a doing. In a musical theatre context, this composition is the cumulative performance and reception of text, score, and physical action, but there is a danger of conversations circulating between primarily able-​bodied theatre-​makers and able-​ bodied audiences –​without the input or intervention of disabled persons with the knowledge that comes from lived experience. How might a disabled person do musical theatre differently? How might these changes make the art form more accessible?

Conclusion Philosophy and theatre scholar Paul Woodruff suggests that “[t]‌heater is the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching, in a measured time and place” (18). Woodruff ’s definition of worth hinges on “capturing people’s attention” and “making it actually good for them to watch”  –​value-​oriented assessments. What happens when you place disability at the center of this process? How does disability call, and hold, an audience’s attention in the theatre? Is it through staring and the apprehension of extraordinary difference? Or perhaps by creating space for disability, we can find productive points of alienation and alignment with identities-​in-​difference? Seeing attitudes towards disability as central to performance in the American stage musical challenges capitalist ideologies of identity production and offers a framework for investigating these questions. By understanding our cultural investment in performing illnesses and disability onstage in ways that please presumably nondisabled audiences, we learn more about the bodily anxieties we hold as individuals and as a society, too.

Note 1 Following Elizabeth Wollman (2017), I use “American stage musical” or the more general term “musical theatre” when referring to musical theatre as an art form and genre of musicals. “Broadway,” “Broadway musical,” and its variants are used to specifically refer to a musical’s commercial production.

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Works cited Barras, Charles M. The Black Crook: An Electronic Edition.Transcribed by Doug Reside. The New York Public Library, 2 June 2013. www.s3.amazonaws.com/​lpa-​musical.nypl.org/​MusicalMonth/​BlackCrook/​ BlackCrook.pdf, accessed 10 July 2017. Brady, Mo, and Nikka Graff Lanzarone. “next to normal.” The Ensemblist. 20 November 2016. www. theensemblist.com, accessed 23 November 2016. “Cagney, Film ‘Tough Guy,’ Turns Dancer.” Herald. Syracuse (NY). 15 November 1937, p. 20. Charlton, James I. Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Cingari, Jennifer. “ESPN Sports Science Takes Disney’s The Lion King into the Lab.” ESPN. 1 November 2016. www.espnfrontrow.com/​2016/​11/​espn-​sport-​science-​takes-​disneys-​lion-​king-​lab/​, accessed 15 November 2016. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. “Becoming-​ Intense, Becoming-​ Animal.” In A Thousand Plateaus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. “Football.” The Oklahoma City Times. (Oklahoma City, Okla.), 16 November 1916. Chronicling America:  Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. www.chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/​lccn/​ sn86064187/​1916-​11-​16/​ed-​1/​seq-​7/​, accessed 13 December 2017. Fox, Ann. “Scene in a New Light:  Monstrous Mothers, Disabled Daughters, and the Performance of Feminism and Disability in The Light in the Piazza (2005) and Next to Normal (2008).” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. Edited by Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-​Moulton, Neil William Lerner, and Joseph Nathan Straus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 755–​794. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies:  Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Johnston, Kristy. Disability and Modern Drama:  Recasting Modernism. New  York:  Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016. Knapp, Raymond. “ ‘Waitin’ for the Light to Shine’: Musicals and Disability.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. Edited by Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-​Moulton, Neil William Lerner, and Joseph Nathan Straus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 814–​835. Kuppers, Petra. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. New York: Routledge, 2003. —​—​—​. Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. —​—​—​. Theatre & Disability. London: Palgrave, 2017. Mainwaring, L.M., D. Krasnow, and G. Kerr. “And The Dance Goes On: Psychological Impact Of Injury.” Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, vol. 5, no. 4, 2001, pp. 105–​115. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Mordden, Ethan. Anything Goes:  A History of American Musical Theater. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2013. Moseley, Rachel. “Crazy Sexy Strong.” Cosmopolitan. 13 July 2016. www.cosmopolitan.com/​style-​beauty/​ a58709/​cynthia-​erivo-​crazy-​sexy-​strong/​, accessed 13 July 2016. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications:  Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Norman, Marsha, and Lucy Simon. The Secret Garden. New York: Samuel French, 1992. “Playbill for The Black Crook at Niblo’s Garden.” Performing Arts Collection PA-​00113. The Black Crook Collection, 1853–​1929. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX. www. norman.hrc.utexas.edu/​fasearch/​findingAid.cfm?eadid=01108, accessed 10 July 2017. “Rita Hayworth Rises from Bit Parts into a Triple-​Threat Song & Dance Star.” Life Magazine, 11 August 1941, p.33. Ross, George. “In New York.” Times. Chester, PA. 28 February 1938, p. 7. Russell, Bill, Henry Krieger, and Bill Condon. Side Show. New York: Samuel French, 2014. Sandahl, Carrie, and Philip Auslander, eds. Bodies in Commotion:  Disability and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Schwartz, Stephen, and Joseph Stein. The Baker’s Wife:  Libretto Vocal Book. New  York:  Music Theatre International, 1993.

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23 OF SCAPEGHOSTS AND MEN Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes and the politics of learning disability Anna Harpin

In April 2005, when the Criminal Justice Act (2003) became law, disability hate crime was finally recognised within the criminal justice system (Quarmby, 8). Though not a separate offence, it was now possible for the courts to consider whether a murder was aggravated by disability hatred and to, therefore, increase the sentence. In 2005 Keith Philpott, from Billingham near Middlesbrough, was tortured and killed by people who claimed to be his friends. In 2006 Barrie-​John Horrell from Pontlottyn was brutally killed and his body burned by people who claimed to be his friends. In the same year, in St Austell, Stephen Hoskin was tortured, drugged, and made to jump to his own death by a group claiming to be his friends, and Raymond Atherton was similarly beaten to death by people claiming to be his friends. In Aberdeen in 2007 Laura Milne was murdered and dismembered by her “friends”, and, in Oxford, Sean Miles was tortured and murdered by his “friends”. In 2008, Brent Martin. In 2009, Michael Gilbert. In 2010, Gemma Hayter. One could continue year on year with other names including Michael Kerr, Susan Whiting, Lee Irving, and more. In all of these cases, the victims had learning impairments and all understood their murderers to be their friends. This phenomenon has, in part, led to the concept of “mate crime”.1 In all cases the deaths were marked by extreme cruelty, brutality, prolonged torture, and humiliation. Moreover, in almost all cases the murderers were young people, operating in mixed-​sex groups, and were from deprived socio-​economic backgrounds. In several instances, the victims’ benefits had been routinely taken by their attackers prior to the murder and some victims had been enslaved to work for their captors (again with their benefits stolen). As Imogen Tyler notes, not only did recorded incidents of disability hate crime grow “by 60 per cent between 2009 and 2011”, but also the cuts to benefits and the introduction of work capability assessments led to a specific rise in crime against perceived “scroungers” and “fakers” (208–​9). However, as the SCOPE report into murders such as these found: “In almost all cases, the sentences were far lower [than for similarly high-​profile and violent racially motivated murders] and none of the cases was treated as motivated by disability hatred” (Quarmby, 16–​17). Disability here is, thus, apparently both hyper-​visible in the profiles of the cases and yet legalistically imperceptible. Furthermore, the journalism regarding the cases consistently (and sympathetically) acknowledges the “vulnerability” of the victims and foregrounds disability as a defining context against which the murders take place.Yet there appears to be little sustained interrogation of the interlocking questions that these crimes raise in relation to disability, class, 276

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economics, and violence.2 Moreover, the language used to describe the perpetrators is laced with pejorative terminology in relation to their class, intellectual capacity, and mental states. In this sense, the murders are framed as barbaric, tragic aberrations perpetrated by “feral” youth, by bad apples.3 The luminous problem, it strikes me, is that the news stories thus become cast in highly theatrical, familiar, and problematic narratives of good and bad “outsiders”, or, “abjected bodies”.4 For example, the alleged sadism of the perpetrators relies upon the alleged vulnerability of the victims –​often described in terms such as “unassuming”,“gentle”,“bespectacled”.5 Likewise, the able-​bodiedness and manipulation of the perpetrators in some ways demands the disability and naivety of the victims for the narrative, or social script, to work. Further, all of the actors in these dramas mutually rest on submerged dramaturgies of poverty, degeneration, and heredity as well as pivoting on well-​worn tropes that attend on disability: pity and menace. The issue here is that the socio-​cultural conversation is already cast within predetermined narrative coordinates and political dualisms that paradoxically beget one another. Under such a regime of thinking, disability is sustained as lack, difference, and weakness; poverty is sustained as gross, damned, and dangerous. In this sense, both social categories –​of class and disability –​remain in “types” and thus remain bonded in their shared social exclusion. Moreover, both are tacitly understood to be “types” that one would necessarily aim to aspire out of. The challenge, I  propose in this chapter, is to interrogate the performance of social class within cultural narratives of violence, to examine the politics that structure such violence, and, most crucially, to consider the conditions that produce disability itself as a category of apparent ontological difference. Plainly, what social and political conditions make disability legible and meaningful as disability? And should these be contested? To what extent are social categories always and necessarily mutually constitutive? That is to ask, how far, for example, does class co-​ constitute the meaning of disability and vice versa? And if so, does this render disability, in certain contexts and in certain manners, politically indistinguishable from class? Through these types of questions, I hope that this may begin to contribute to a shift in the types of conversations and narratives we, in the UK and beyond, stage around disability, class, and power. In these pages, I argue that cinematic culture offers one such aperture through which to re-​view the social conditions of human difference. As Sharon Snyder and David T. Mitchell remind us: “Because most people have the majority of their interactions with disability through written and visual materials, the analysis of this domain can provide significant interventions into the public representation of bodily, sensory, and cognitive difference” (Cultural Locations, 201). The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to critically examine a British film that renders cinematic the bullying, torture, and murder of a young man with learning impairments by a group of working-​class men who claimed to be his friends. I do so in order to uncover and interrogate the questions the film poses about masculinity, class, and disability. Though it is in many ways not a film that is about disability, nonetheless it is an important piece of cinema for the field insofar as it captures less what disability is than how, and why, it is made, performed, and destroyed. Indeed, the apparently incidental nature of learning disability within the film marks its peculiar significance for study. As Licia Carlson has demonstrated in The Faces of Intellectual Disability (2009), different historical moments have framed those with impairments in contrary manners with respect to criminality. While today there is an association between intellectual impairment and vulnerability, in the early part of the twentieth century the association was more keenly of the impaired figure as threat or perpetrator. In this sense, there is no stable, static cultural image of disability but rather shifting, ideologically driven, tales of difference. In this spirit, I will unpack and politically critique both the availability and the nature of disability as metaphor, device, and visual idiom in this film. In short, through an exploration of class, gender and sexuality, and form, I will argue that Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) interrogates learning disability as the master signifier of neoliberal 277

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“waste populations”. As numerous analyses of neoliberal capitalism have shown, its claims to freedom mask a commitment to governmental interventions that convert social relations into forms of competition between individuals.6 This raises acute questions with respect to the value and capacity of the disabled body. If one’s capacity to compete is determined by one’s capacity to realise one’s potential value as a unit of human capital, then both disabled and working-​class bodies are inevitably positioned in a space of precarity, a position whose evident social construction is naturalised by the discursive formation of neoliberalism. Moreover, under austerity, the need to prove oneself really disabled in order to be a legitimate non-​producer, and therefore to receive benefits, unavoidably defines disability as a social and economic burden, as a deficit. Indeed, if personhood is primarily construed as a function of economic productivity, then a disabled person becomes, in effect, a contradiction in terms. In this sense, there can be no such thing as a disabled person. Under such a logic, one is either really disabled and thus a social burden (and denied access to neoliberal personhood) or else a malingerer (with its class-​marked connotations). In practice, this binary distinction presents no dilemma: both positions define a failed subject, a waste product. Dead Man’s Shoes, I contend, exposes the constructedness and mutuality of class and disability as a means to critique the violent politics of neoliberalism for socially marginalised bodies.

Definitive variance Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson proposes that: “Disability has four aspects: first, it is a system for interpreting bodily variations; second, it is a relation between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that produce the able-​bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self ” (74).While Matt Hargrave, in his study of learning disability and theatre, charts the disability rights movement as “an emancipatory process seeking to uncover and dismantle the mechanisms by which all industrial societies operate an ‘ableist’ ideology: that is, the structures of thought and social organisation that validate able-​ bodiedness and high cognitive functioning as the validating ideal of humanity” (21). In both of these arguments disability is understood as both human variance and as a social practice of reading such variance. Disability is simultaneously both concept and lived encounter. In this sense, both authors appear to subscribe to a model of thinking which understands disability and impairment as encultured, felt, relational, biological, and social. Such an understanding speaks broadly to both the cultural and the interactional models of disability as proposed by figures such as Tom Shakespeare, instead of to the more rigid social and medical models which shaped early disability debates and discourses. It is not the remit of this chapter to rehearse the histories of such discussions here.7 It remains, however, important to position the language and models that undergird the following analysis. Joanna Bourke’s cultural history of pain suggests that pain is a relational, encultured encounter:  “Although pain is generally regarded as a subjective phenomenon  –​it possesses a ‘mine-​ness’ [after Paul Ricouer]  –​‘naming’ occurs in public realms” (6). She continues by observing that pain is a cultural inheritance: “people learnt that this is being-​in-​pain while that is something else –​an itch, a feeling of heaviness, vertigo, or jouissance, for instance. Equally, pain becomes recognised by other people through the same interactive process” (26). Bourke thus frames pain as a reiterative performance insofar as it unconsciously reproduces learned knowledges, roles, and practices. If pain is a public practice, an “event” as opposed to an object or thing, then can we understand disability as a related process or experience? Disability is shaped by manifest phenomena (restricted movement, aptitudes for logic, variance in visual fields of perception, exhaustion, and so on). It is also shaped by cultural norms, attitudes, and limitations 278

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that produce exclusion. There is also a biological component to all human variance insofar as having a body is a rare universal. To imply there is a performative quality to disability is certainly not to participate in allegations of malingering or even to suggest that such performances are deliberate, conscious actions. Rather, I contend that a performative, relational model that understands both disability and impairment as biopsychosocial affords vital room for excavating the stories, rituals, naming processes, environments, relationships, narratives, institutions, and so forth that produce both disability and its opposite, so-​called ability. While I share Hargrave’s desire to leave behind the “empty universal of ability” because “there is no ‘disability’, only different capabilities contained in a plethora of human potential”, in this chapter I will purposefully employ the language of difference (as witnessed in “disability” and “impairment”) as a means of interrogating and ultimately abandoning such language in favour of notions of human variance (233). Indeed, by attempting to expose how disability is culturally produced in this film, I aim to move away from the fixity of identity (I am) and towards a more radical model of capabilities (I experience). In this regard, I am less preoccupied with what disability is (or is not) than how it is produced, distributed, experienced, and sustained. Moreover, in moving from “I am” to “I experience”, I am pursuing a model of thinking that rejects a sense that disability is simply a static thing that an individual has; instead I am embracing a more relational, felt, and dynamic understanding of human variance. This also marks a desire to reject a deficit model of disability in favour of a model that attends to the generative political capacity of variance.

Get in the back of the van Standard accounts of Shane Meadows’ cinematic oeuvre emphasise his working-​class roots, low-​budgets, DIY production methods, semi-​improvised approach to scripting and shooting, use of non-​professional actors, and a thematic preoccupation with working-​class masculinity. A particular consequence of this framing of his work is to underscore the authenticity of his voice as an insider to the lives and hardships he depicts. Indeed, many interviews, DVD extras, and academic articles observe the autobiographical origins of his films, particularly with respect to violent male cultures.8 Dead Man’s Shoes, in this sense, bears all the hallmarks of a Meadows production. It is a low-​budget revenge thriller that is set on a deprived estate and follows a group of young, disenfranchised men. However, alongside the more familiar terrain of dispossessed working-​class political life is sutured a storyline of disability, torture, and murder. This was not the first time Meadows had depicted disabled characters. A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) explored the interactions between two boys (one of whom had a physical impairment) and an older man (who is framed as being mentally “borderline handicapped”) (Bradshaw).9 However, this later film offers a more sophisticated and sustained exploration of the interrelationships between class, masculinity, and human capacity.

Getting wasted In brief, the film charts the revenge tragedy narrative of Richard (Paddy Considine) as he seeks to avenge the death of his brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell) who has been bullied, tortured, and murdered by a gang of local men, headed up by Sonny (Gary Stretch).10 The film’s coup is to reveal Anthony (who appears as a full character for most of the film) as in fact a ghost. On the one hand it may strike some readers as immediately problematic. It appears to follow the Rain Man model of allowing “normates” to learn valuable lessons through an encounter with disability.11 It retroactively frames the disabled character as supernatural. It reaffirms the ties between tragedy and disability that scholars have long sought to disentangle. And it essentialises 279

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disability insofar as Anthony’s learning impairments are the most important thing about his character. Moreover, even in the film’s promotional materials Dead Man’s Shoes participates in problematic narratives about disability. For example, Meadows praises for Kebbell for “doing” disability well: “The part is a lad called Anthony who has mental disabilities, so it’s a difficult role to play, even with a lot of research time. But Toby came in really late…He ended up doing it brilliantly. He’s more than ably filled the shoes” (“Shane Meadows and Associates”, 910, emphasis mine).This not only implies that disability is a thing to be “known” and “got right” via research, but also emphasises Kebbell’s extra ability: he’s so good he can even do disabled, quickly. As Petra Kuppers argues in relation to Rain Man (1988): “In his role, the non-​disabled Hoffman is still visible –​his presence is the palimpsest that allows the audience to engage in the movements of make-​believe. The ‘presence’ of autism is held at arm’s distance. To ‘be’ autistic would mean not to be able to be ‘a performer’ ” (Kuppers, 54). Sounding a related note, founder of Graeae Theatre Company Richard Tomlinson notes, “The irony is when they [disabled people] are on stage, the audience often refuses to accept that a blind actress is in fact blind, or a deaf actress deaf ” (14). In these manners, one may wish to critique the film for reinscribing ableist fantasies of difference. On the other hand, I would like to argue that in figuring Anthony as a tragic scapeghost, the film is able to explore the ways in which working-​class masculinity and disability are mutually produced as “waste populations” under a neoliberal regime. This is not to create an equivalence between the two; rather it is to expose the capitalist structures that create the conditions in which both become legible as waste.

Taking the blame In his essay about tragedy and ethics in British social realist cinema, Paul Dave describes Anthony as a political scapegoat that operates as an indictment of the society that has forsaken him: “As scapegoat, Anthony’s existence challenges the neoliberal attack on the social and the working class. That is to say, by embracing Anthony –​as the abject, the ‘weak’ –​those around him would be capable of rediscovering the ‘equality of being’ that can remake social solidarity” (39). Drawing on Terry Eagleton and Paul Ricouer, Dave here rightly presses upon us the use of Antony as metaphor for the denigration of working-​class men under neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, he goes on to argue that the abuse of Anthony is far from an aberration but rather the logical product of neoliberalism, describing bullying as “something structurally integral to neoliberalism” (40). I am interested, however, in the ghostliness of this scapegoat. In paying attention to the spectral qualities of Anthony’s role, one is able to see that the film not only exposes the decimation of working-​class subjectivity but also how Meadows’ complicates Anthony as merely a cipher of “vulnerability”. Indeed, in certain ways Anthony is Richard, or, is at least his phantom double. Richard is the only one who can see Anthony. Both are socially cast as “weirdos”. Richard forms a ghostly presence in Anthony’s funeral sequence. Richard has a spectral quality insofar as his stealth makes him appear as if he can almost walk through walls as he haunts and stalks the gang. He impersonates Anthony and seeks narrative conclusion in pleading to be killed in the same ruins of Riber Castle where his brother died. Further, the double itself as a structure acts as a performative mechanism to see things differently by virtue of a two-​fold awareness. Critics such as Paul Elliott, Martin Fradley, Sarah Godfrey, and Melanie Williams evoke notions such as the return of the repressed and the uncanny to describe the tone of the film.12 In addition to the long tracking shots of the two brothers walking across landscape behind one another, visually the pair are frequently framed as one another’s echo, mirror, or shadow (Figures 23.1 and 23.2):

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Figures 23.1 and 23.2  “Brotherly Doubles” in Dead Man’s Shoes, dir. Shane Meadows, Warp Films (2004).

This doubling, I propose, is significant for the politics of disability for two primary reasons. Firstly, and perhaps more straightforwardly, the blurred distinction between the two men disrupts the certainty of their presumed ontological difference as “normal” and “disabled”. Through this doubling Meadows’ agitates the idea of disability as a category of ontological difference. Secondly, it is tempting to scale this argument, to read the film as populated by ghostly men 281

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living in an abandoned town. As Clair Schwarz writes: “much of the film’s sparsely populated mise-​en-​scène resembles the post-​social desolation and economic impoverishment of the Western ‘ghost town’ ” (105). Furthermore, the gang are called “goonies”. Richard, when wearing the gas mask, is described as the “elephant” (man), and Richard is himself a war veteran and thus carries within his image long-​standing histories of “broken” and “damaged” men. Moreover, there are multiple intimations throughout the film that cast, albeit via pejorative means, all the characters as “idiots”. Indeed, the gang are framed in many ways as adolescent. Here unemployed bodies, like learning impaired bodies are, in certain ways, cast as forever children. On the one hand, this is problematic insofar as it describes the brutalised nature of working-​class culture precisely via the metaphor of disability. The gang are, in this sense, disabled by neoliberal society wherein they have no value as economic producers. It is notable that the only one who has left the gang is the only one to have attained key normative markers of success (home-​owner, job, wife, kids, car). He is, thus, not deficit but a producer of social and economic capital. On the other hand, to draw a keen distinction between Anthony and “the rest” is to reassert a dualism of ability and disability that the film unsettles. Anthony is both disabled and working class. Moreover, under a neoliberal regime these abject identities share coordinates of exclusion that are valuable to acknowledge. Discussing Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Snyder and Mitchell remind us that, for Bauman, to apprehend the holocaust as extraordinary is to “fail to recognise the Holocaust as a by-​product of modern utopian fantasies” and thus to “avoid the task of making urgent critiques of our own fetishization of normativity” (Cultural Locations, 32). If we only critique the use of disability as metaphor in this film, we fail to apprehend how far it exposes the interlocking fetishization of normative coordinates that are at play under neoliberal capitalism; coordinates that produce political scapeghosts like Anthony, like Richard, like Sonny et al. Adrian Poole writes that “tragedy stages moments of crisis in a community’s understanding of itself, moments when it risks being torn apart by conflicting beliefs about the gods, political authority, relations between the generations and the sexes, between natives and immigrants” (41). Perhaps a valid continuation of this list could be the “normal” and the “deviant” and thus the film can be said to be staging a crisis of categorisation. If so, Dead Man’s Shoes, through its exploration of the sticky proximity of so-​called ability and so-​called disability, can be understood to both expose and resist neoliberal fantasies of ontological difference.While, of course, neoliberalism did not “invent” ontological difference it has nonetheless mobilised it to economic ends. In this manner, neoliberal thinking requires disability as a means to shore up its counter image –​economically productive normativity. Dead Man’s Shoes explodes the myth of such difference by casting light on the constructed nature of interlocking social categories of difference.

Being a man The figure of the scapegoat is further multiplied throughout the film. Anthony is, of course, the master scapegoat. The gang’s bullying and suiciding of Anthony mark the film’s clearest examples of how one man is exposed as lack in order to attempt to sustain the secure, valuable, social identities of other men. The erasure of Anthony thus pursues the inclusion of the gang into social economies of masculine worth. Indeed, it is notable that Anthony is raped in the film by proxy.The character of Patti is coerced into having sex with Anthony following Sonny’s threat to make Anthony give him a blow job. In this sense, Patti acts as a surrogate for Sonny’s sexual violence against Anthony. After the sex with Patti, Anthony is congratulated by the men as if he has been interpellated into a sexual economy of worth. Anthony is thus made a man by being proxy-​raped by Sonny. The gang’s masculinity is, in this way, doubly shored up. First, 282

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by enacting sexual violence but via a female body (ensuring heteronormativity is persevered). Second, the gang confirm their masculine sexuality by enforcing Anthony (as the scapegoated figure of their own abject “weakness”) to perform in this economy. Indeed, sexual power (or lack thereof) is repeatedly foregrounded in the film. For example, an audience’s first introduction to several of the gang is watching them read aloud from porn magazines or hearing them boast about their plans to shag women. Likewise, three of the gang are turned into female clowns during a stealth attack by Richard (Figure 23.3):

Figure 23.3  “Sonny” in Dead Man’s Shoes, dir. Shane Meadows, Warp Films (2004).

One may wish to question this logic. It appears as if the film is using Anthony as feminised scapegoat via his learning impairments to make a point about working-​class masculinity. He is available as metaphor or symbol in this way because he is disabled. However, if we again consider scapegoating and more specifically scapeghosting an alternative perspective is possible. Within the internal logic of the film-​world it is without question that Anthony is exposed as the gang’s projected shame regarding their own weakness. He is bullied because of his learning impairments. In short, they attack him for representing their own perceived lack as “men”. However, just as we previously noted the sticky proximity of ability and disability, here again we can see –​via images of “weakness” in the film –​the shared manners in which forms of social exclusion are produced under neoliberal capitalism. The gang are themselves scapegoated by Richard –​a squaddie (read: hyper masculine). Richard picks them off one by one and stages each of their deaths for the rest of the group. The murders are thus highly theatrical. The men are made examples of (Figures 23.4 and 23.5). Not only are they visibly made scapegoats in this way, the inevitability of the revenge tragedy form means that these characters are always already dead men walking. They are ghosts. In this sense, the images of their bodies as ghostly exemplars, as scapeghosts, renders luminous the social and moral logic behind their executions. As Beth Johnson and Joe Andrew argue, this is, in part, in dialogue with Anthony’s torture: Each of the five men is treated in a way that mirrors what they had done to Anthony. Thus Gypsy John is executed at his most vulnerable moment (on the toilet) in the near presence of people that could, perhaps, have saved him. Soz [sic], like Anthony, is forced into an unfamiliar and cramped space…As the gang had forced Anthony to perform for them, so Richard forces Soz and Herbie to dance for him. Then, in an almost perfect 283

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replay of the scene in which Sonny had tried to force Anthony to fellate him, Richard drags the semi-​naked and utterly helpless Sonny out to the very same kitchen, there to execute him. (872) Yet there is more to say here. The men who are made scapeghosts by Richard are framed in his revenge logic as feminised, vulnerable, helpless, made to dance, act and look like fools, exposed in their embodied states, weak. They are, in this sense, cast in some of the social vocabularies of

Figure 23.4  “Gypsy John” dead on the toilet in Dead Man’s Shoes, dir. Shane Meadows, Warp Films (2004).

Figure 23.5  Murdered “Tuff ” stuffed in a suitcase in Dead Man’s Shoes, dir. Shane Meadows, Warp Films (2004).

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disability and learning impairment.This logic makes legible the apparent contradiction between masculinity and disability. As Tom Shakespeare writes, “The traditional account, such as it is, of disabled masculinity, rests…on the notion of contradiction: femininity and disability reinforced each other, masculinity and disability conflict with each other” (57). Dead Man’s Shoes appears to confirm this conflict by framing the gang in disablist thinking. However, is it once more possible here to argue for the mutuality of abjected identities by understanding all these men as always already socially dead, as the living ghosts of neoliberal capital. Jobless, childless, and unmarried these men repeatedly fail to perform heteronormative masculinity. Furthermore, in their attempts to interpellate Anthony in such economies of value –​they make him shop for them, they make him their child, they rape him –​they underscore the very inaccessibility of such realms for men like them. Anthony is likewise framed, owing to his disability, as deficit, as non-​productive body under the terms of capitalism. Under such a regime both class and disability are things to aspire out of. Robert McRuer’s notion of “compulsory able-​bodiedness” underscores this by exposing how far such thinking argues that able bodies and minds are what we are all “aiming for” (372, emphasis mine). Bodies and minds are thus things to be monitored and managed via neoliberal technologies of self-​governance in order to perform legitimate citizenship. As Snyder and Mitchell suggest: Neoliberal bodies, in this sense, provide opportunities for treating the individual topos of biology as, in-​and-​of-​itself, a site of perpetual improvement for market-​based exploitations, and informational/​ affective resource extraction…those who don’t adequately maintain their bodies are held personally responsible for their descent into the chaos of ill health and nonwell being. (Biopolitics, 12 and 102) As I have written elsewhere, such health hygiene relies on reiterative performances of shared taxonomies of normal that are simply unavailable to certain “types” of bodies and experiences.13 Here such things as fatness or hallucinations attain a moral force quite unbelonging to them. In a similar way poor and disabled are things to be, at best, overcome, and, at worst, managed. Neither working-​class bodies nor disabled bodies have any such opportunities in Dead Man’s Shoes. Both abject categories, then, are the living scapeghosts of capitalism. In exposing the illegitimacy of both of these categories of identity and experience, Meadows, I propose, invites an audience to confront the violent, exclusory model of neoliberal personhood.

Heroes and monsters Two scapeghosts remain. Richard and Mark (Paul Hurstfield). In the concluding scenes –​of Day 5 –​Richard hunts down the missing gang member, Mark, and seeks this tragedy’s denouement. Mark’s crime was being a bystander: “I didn’t stop it” (Meadows, 01:19:20). His punishment is thus that he must stop the revenge cycle. Richard implores: “you were supposed to be a monster, now I’m the fuckin’ beast, there’s blood on my hands, look what you made me do. Come on, stick that knife in me. I don’t know what else I’m capable of doing…I just wanna lie with my brother” (Meadows, 01:21:56). Like Othello’s Emilia who requests “Ay, ay. O, lay me by my mistress’ side!” Richard’s final request enacts a dual moment of recognition of betrayal and its belated atonement (Shakespeare, V.2.244, 2169): “he fuckin’ was a spastic… he was a fuckin’ naanaa…he was an embarrassment to me…I love you Anthony but I can’t do it” (Meadows, 01:18:35). Here Richard scapegoats himself as not the avenging antihero of the film but instead another ghostly culprit in the suiciding of Anthony, another man suspended in 285

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perpetual abjection. Mark, on the other, is the full stop in this revenge tragedy plot. He is the gang member who got away and now is spared. He is cast in a narrative of “overcoming” insofar as he is framed, in stark contrast to the single, unemployed, childless men of the remaining gang, as a working, married, father (notably of two boys). He is thus a producing figure of neoliberal norms and ideals. However, he too is ghosted by his encounter with death. Indeed, as the film concludes Mark is sent out of the ruins of Riber Castle with both literal and symbolic blood on his hands. The final scapegoat is thus saved and cast out of the community of men in order to resolve the problems he has witnessed therein. The blood, however, reminds an audience that far from being its solution, Mark is stained with the very sins that produced the catastrophe:  masculine normativity. There is no comfort in the conclusion. Rather the film ends with aerial shots over Riber Castle, and the estates and farms of Uttoxeter. Such shots serve to underscore the unremarkability of this tragedy. If, as Poole has suggested, tragedy argues that “this life is exceptional”, Meadows inverts this to precisely suggest that instead, the tragedy lies in the unremarkability of Anthony’s death (1). So far I  have argued that through his exploration of the mutuality of forms of systemic exclusion Shane Meadows offers a critique of some of the interlocking systems of normativity that are at play under neoliberal capitalism. I have also proposed that the figure of the scapeghost allows us to consider the conditions that produce social abjection through creating a social class of living ghosts. Much of the discussion has focussed on individual characters but attempted to point to the political sameness (from the purview of neoliberalism) that conditions aspects of marginalised selfhoods. This is not in a bid to create an equivalency or to imply there are no particularities to either class or disability as either categories of identity or as the lived realities of experience. It is simply to draw attention to the way that they are in social, cultural, and political dialogue with one another in important ways. To return to Bourke, it is to consider how these encultured narratives intertwine and interact. I do so in the hope that through an intersectional model of thinking one might ultimately help to expose neoliberalism as the catastrophe of our times that flattens human variance into categories of productivity and deficit. However, there is one final point to make prior to conclusion which centres around questions of collectivity, community, and trauma. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) she develops the concept of “rememory”. This notion captures a great deal in the novel about the unstable traffic between remembering and forgetting, but perhaps most usefully for our purposes highlights the porous nature of traumatic memory –​ memory which might be considered to have breached its supposedly sovereign boundaries. Morrison draws our attention to how far memory remains, haunting landscapes: “you be walking down the road and you hear something…And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else” (Beloved, 34). Meadows offers a cinematic version of this concept in Dead Man’s Shoes. The film includes multiple black-​and-​white sequences of the bullying, torture, and murder of Anthony. However, rather than emerging from point-​of-​view shots as one might expect of cinematic flashbacks, these scenes are always dispersed between the men. Indeed, there are multiple sequences when it is clear that all of the men are remembering the same moment. Perhaps most significantly, Richard appears to also share these memories even though he was never present and thus can possess the memories in an ordinary sense. In this way, Meadows offers a sense of traumatic memory that haunts the landscape, that doesn’t properly belong to anyone. Memory stalks the estate in much the way Richard does. This, I propose, further underscores the unremarkability of the tragedy insofar as it is rendered almost the very atmosphere of the town. This is further amplified by the dislocation of cause and effect within the film with respect to violence. For example, as noted, Anthony is raped by the group but there is a gap, or surrogate for the 286

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violence, in the form of Patti. Anthony is murdered by the group but there is again a gap in the perpetration insofar as technically he ends his own life. Likewise, Richard turns his suicide to murder. This fracturing of trauma and cause amplifies the sense of violence as not being simply actions done by people to others but also as being the very structures and atmospheres for living in. It is my contention that in so doing, Meadows ask us to focus not only on the tragedy of an individual story (in this case Anthony) but simultaneously on the catastrophe of collective abjection.

Ruined ghosts Hargrave has argued that inclusion does not solve the problems of power. He writes that arguments for diversity necessarily accept the idea “that there is a non-​diverse centre from which to deviate”, and thereby reasons that “Diversity is uniformity’s best-​kept secret” (233). Sounding a related note, Snyder and Mitchell have proposed that arguing for “positive” content in relation to disability representation is to “merely replace one form of historical simplification with another” and thus the objective is rather to “destabilize ways of knowing disability” (Cultural Locations, 4). I have not sought, therefore, to argue that Meadows offers a “positive” view of disability or that his representational practice is in any way exemplary. Indeed, it is far from achieving the goal that Phoebe Hart suggests regarding the urgency of prioritising films by disabled filmmakers so that they can “revise and control the production of history” (87). It is perhaps most accurate to think of Dead Man’s Shoes as, at least in part, a product of ableist fantasies of disability. As Morrison has argued, the subject of the dream is always the dreamer.14 And, as Jeffrey Preston has noted: “media representations of disability are not about the disabled but about the nondisabled encountering their own fear of disablement” (19). Nevertheless, if the goal is, as Snyder and Mitchell argue, to destabilise ways of knowing then examining a film like this has three-​fold worth. Firstly, it makes legible an ableist gaze through the quality of metaphor that is useful to critique for what it reveals without aiming to reveal. Secondly, it destabilises the certainty of ontological difference through an intersectional understanding of class and disability. In so doing it foregrounds how both categories are made, sustained, and narrativised. In particular the film’s attention to labour, productivity, and systemic exclusion highlight the economics of normativity in significant ways. Thirdly, while it does not represent the appalling cases with which this chapter began, Dead Man’s Shoes nevertheless offers a searing critique of the invisibility, the ghostliness, of certain “kinds” of people. While some of the cases were briefly high-​profile, disability hate crime remains largely overlooked as a systemic and pervasive problem. A fourth contribution to impairment discourse that this film makes is to complicate cultural narratives of disability by pushing beyond tales of impoverished monsters and vulnerable victims. Instead, in offering us the multiple and multiplying ruined scapeghosts of capitalism, Meadows invites audiences to question the worth and capacity of neoliberalism as a set of world-​making practices.

Notes 1 “Mate crime” is British slang for crimes perpetrated by individuals or groups who pose as friends or allies to particularly vulnerable people in order to exploit them (financially, sexually, and so forth). 2 Katherine Quarmby’s journalism in The Guardian, UK, is a notable exception to this generalisation. 3 The Wigan Post, for example, describes Atherton’s killers as “feral, wild, and untamed” (4 April 2007). Likewise, QC John Charles Rees, in polite class-​marked code, describes Horrell’s killers as “not the brightest and not the most mature…chronic alcoholics”, South Wales Argus, 4 May 2007. 4 I am drawing here on Tyler’s notion of social abjection in Revolting Subjects.

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Anna Harpin 5 See, for example, BBC News coverage on 4 May 2007, http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​hi/​wales/​south_​east/​ 6624515.stm. Last accessed 2 May 2019. 6 See, for example, Jeremy Gilbert, “What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’?” in Jeremy Gilbert, Neoliberal Culture (Chadwell Heath: Lawrence and Wishart, 2016), pp. 10–​32, and Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 7 See, for example, Christopher A.  Riddle, “The Ontology of Impairment:  Rethinking How We Define Disability” in Matthew Wappelt and Katrina Arndt (eds), Emerging Perspectives on Disability 39, and Tom Shakespeare, Disability Rights and Wrongs Studies (London:  Palgrave, 2013), pp.  23–​ (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). 8 See, for example, Paul Elliott, “ ‘Now I’m the Monster’:  Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Dead Man’s Shoes and TwentyFourSeven” in Martin Fradley, Sarah Godfrey, and Melanie Williams (eds), Shane Meadows: Critical Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 83–​ 94, as well as the introduction to this collection for two examples of this tendency. 9 This phrase is used by Peter Bradshaw in his review of the film, which criticises the stereotyped portrayal of the character Morell (Paddy Considine). 10 There is a woman in the group, Patti (Emily Aston), but she is a marginalised figure and not central to the narrative. 11 I am borrowing the term “normates” here from Rosemarie Garland-​ Thomson from her book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University, 1996). 12 See for example, Paul Elliot, p. 87, and Fradley, Godfrey, and Williams, p. 9. 13 See, for example, c­hapters  5 and 6 of my monograph Madness, Art, and Society:  Beyond Illness (London: Routledge, 2018) for a discussion of body weight and mood respectively in terms of health hygiene. 14 See, Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Picador, 1992).

Works cited Bourke, Joanna. The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Bradshaw, Peter. The Guardian, 4 February 2000. Carlson, Licia. The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Dave, Paul. “Tragedy, Ethics, and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film” in David Tucker (ed.), British Social Realism in the Arts Since 1940. London: Palgrave, 2011, pp. 17–​56. Garland-​ Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Politics of Staring:  Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” in Sharon Snyder and David T. Mitchell (eds), Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2002, pp. 56–​85. Hargrave, Matt. Theatres of Learning Disability: Good, Bad, or, Plain Ugly? London: Palgrave, 2015. Hart, Phoebe. “Aberrancy and Autobiographical Documentary” in Catalin Brylla and Helen Hughes (eds), Documentary and Disability. London: Palgrave, 2017, pp. 79–​93. Johnson, Beth, and Joe Andrew, “Dead Man’s Shoes: Revealing the Subtext of the Lost Maternal”. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 10:4, 2013, pp. 863–​77. Kuppers, Petra. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge. Abingdon: Routledge, 2003. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Meadows, Shane. Dead Man’s Shoes. Warp Films, 2004. —​—​—​. in Jared Wilson. “Shane Meadows and Associates: Selected LeftLion Interviews”. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 10:4, 2013, pp. 909–​24. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. London: Picador, 1992. —​—​—​. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004. Poole, Adrian. Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Preston, Jeffrey. The Fantasy of Disability: Images of Loss in Popular Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Quarmby, Katherine. Getting Away with Murder:  Disabled People’s Experiences of Hate Crime in the UK. London: SCOPE, 2008.

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Of scapeghosts and men Schwarz, Clair.“‘An Object of Indecipherable Bastardry –​A True Monster’: Homosociality, Homoeroticism, and Generic Hybridity in Dead Man’s Shoes’ in Martin Fradley, Sarah Godfrey, and Melanie Williams (eds), Shane Meadows: Critical Essays. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, pp. 95–​110. Shakespeare, Tom. “The Sexual Politics of Disabled Masculinity”. Sexuality and Disability, 17:1, January 1999, pp. 53–​64. Shakespeare, William. “The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice” in Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. Snyder, Sharon, and David T. Mitchell. Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2014. —​—​—​. The Biopolitics of Disability:  Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Tomlinson, Richard. Disability,Theatre, and Education. London: Souvenir Press, 1982. Tyler, Imogen. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books, 2013.

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24 DISABILITY, DRAMA, AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERSECTIONAL INVISIBILITY Ann M. Fox Disability occupies drama, time and again. From Oedipus Rex (fifth century BCE) to Endgame (1957), from Richard III (1592–​3) to Fences (1985), from The Glass Menagerie (1944) to Cost of Living (2016), the Western stage has been populated with characters who limp and stim, who have divergent bodies and atypical minds. Yet literary disability studies still does not turn its attention to this genre with as much frequency as it should. There are some good reasons for this:  the emphasis on disability art and performance; the vibrancy within the humanities of cultural and performance studies; the increasing economic inaccessibility of mainstream theater to many audience members; and most significantly of all, the erasure of disabled people from the stage, both figuratively (when they are used as metaphor) and literally (when nondisabled actors play disabled characters by “cripping up”). Why, after all, give a genre credence that has given crips grief? But in contemporary American drama, there have been important recent shifts around disability and drama. For example, Deaf West’s production of the 2006 musical Spring Awakening played in 2015–​16 to great acclaim, also casting the first actor to use a wheelchair on Broadway (Ali Stroker, who would also go on to be the first wheelchair user to win a Tony in 2019 for Oklahoma!). In his 2017 revival of The Glass Menagerie, director Sam Gold cast an actor (Madison Ferris) who used a wheelchair to play Laura Wingfield, and made use of blocking that placed the disabled body front and center in new and exciting ways. These successes affirm that disability has always been a complex part of drama, a force I  elsewhere have termed the “fabulous invalid” (I appropriated this phrase from George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1938 play of the same name, which refers to an almost-​but-​never-​quite-​dead theater): The fabulous has complex, sometimes divergent meanings; it can be the extraordinary or prodigious, or it can be that which strains credulity. It is my contention that individual disability embodiment, the social construction of the body, and the body politic’s definitions of disability are made all made fabulous through the presence of disability in mainstream theater; in recognizing that fabulosity, we can move to discern a disability inheritance in drama that can be productively embraced rather than prematurely avoided. (Fox 125) 290

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This pervasive presence redeploys disability as political, confrontational, and creative. Given that, there remains much to be done in reinterpreting canonical drama, since plays reveal themselves anew once we read for and through their disability presence. This is even more urgent in light of the otherwise very good news that plays attending to a broad range of identities –​exploring race, gender, sexuality, and class onstage  –​are increasingly visible in the United States and United Kingdom. Yet disability is still dangerously deployed in plays that prominently figure it as part of their social justice endeavor. It is no longer enough simply to invite a rereading of disability in dramatic literature, then: in this essay, I want to issue an invitation to students, playwrights, and critics about the vital importance of considering carefully the use of disability onstage and beyond in simply embodying intersectional identities. Better understanding disability as part of intersectionality is more than simply checking another box as we survey the makeup of fictional landscapes. It challenges the white cisgender heteronormativity of disability as popularly conceptualized:  “[t]‌he layers are so tangled:  gender folds into disability, disability wraps around class, class strains against race, race snarls into sexuality, sexuality hangs onto gender, all of it finally piling into our bodies” (Clare,“Digging”). Dan Goodley builds on this idea of entanglement and asserts that, therefore, critical disability studies must be a platform or plateau through which to think through, act, resist, relate, communicate, engage with one another against the hybridized forms of oppression and discrimination that so often do not speak singularly of disability. Discrimination is an increasingly complicated entanglement of disability, gender, sexuality, nation, ethnicity, age and class. Critical disability studies have not developed simply to capture the theoretical interests of scholars, but have developed theories that are in concert with contemporary lives, the complexities of alienation and rich hopes of resistance. (641) Indeed, as disability history has shown us, it is not possible to understand how systems of oppression have worked without disability. We must understand, then, “how disability is figured in and through these other categories of difference” (Kafer 17). Intersectionality, then, can invite others into more meaningful allyship. Alison Kafer challenges us to imagine what that might mean: This kind of robust combination of future dreams and present critique is essential to politics, and it requires leaving open the parameters of our political visions. Our animating questions could then include the following: Who is included or excluded in our political imaginaries? How are “disability” and “disabled person” (or “woman” or “queer” or “race” or…) being defined in these dreams of the future? Who has access to these imaginaries, and how is access being described? (153) Or in other words, “[h]‌ow can we identify with social categories we don’t identify as and how can this benefit us all?” (Schalk n. pag.). There are those critics who see great opportunity in intersectionality, in bringing the notion of disability into flux, as part of a project of making more complex static or binary notions of identity. But even as we celebrate this complexity, we must remember that while the cohesiveness of disability identity may be productively contested in some areas, it has barely been broached in others; as Carrie Sandahl observes: How do we know what we know from the vantage point of living in and with our very specific bodyminds…? Disabled people are really just at the beginning of 291

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considering this question, and I worry we are moving too quickly away from disability identity before mining it for all that our concrete, grounded experiences have to teach us and others. (McRuer and Johnson 158) Nirmala Erevelles further reminds us that disability as part of intersectionality not only establishes presence, it exposes and disrupts the potentially ableist presumptions of other epistemologies: Take any radical theory –​radical humanism, Marxism, post structuralism, critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, etc. Place a disruptive disability studies in its midst. Tentatively pose questions. Trouble their assumptions undergirding their alternative/​radical conceptions of the normal. What is autonomy? When exactly is life not worth living? Why does rationality have to be the sole determinant of our humanity? How do we define limit? Listen carefully to their answers. (N. pag.) And so, drama, as an embodied art, suggests itself at once as a site both of promise but also peril: it can bring a deeper understanding of the complexity of identity into immediate view, but it can also paradoxically thwart the very visibility it advances by leaning too heavily on old, outmoded disability devices. I offer a case study here of how two contemporary, highly successful American plays, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat (2015) and Taylor Mac’s Hir (2014), function in this manner. Each play explores identities lived at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality; each play has moments in which disability is rendered visible in significant ways. Yet ultimately, each play tends more to further ableism in the name of countering other kinds of oppression. Sweat and Hir represent worthy opportunities for rendering porous the seeming strict divisions between identities; Sweat shows tensions among race, gender, and class, while Hir disrupts normative notions of gender, class, and sexuality. But their projects are ultimately premised more strongly upon highly regressive representations of disability, even as they otherwise deepen the understanding of identity within their contemporary American social and cultural contexts. I  examine what misconceptions and clichés are perpetuated, and what opportunities are missed in the representation of disability in these two plays. I invite readers to consider my arguments here as a way to understand the difficult, but essential tangle of bringing forth disability in an intersectional reading of literary and dramatic works: if we can unearth and unlearn the prejudices on which progressive work is sometimes based, we can then fully take advantage of the opportunities represented by the inclusion of disability in drama and other genres.

Sweat In Sweat, Lynn Nottage creates quasi-​documentary theater based on interviews she conducted in the poverty-​stricken city of Reading, Pennsylvania. The play was first performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015, making its way to Broadway and winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2017. It was praised by critics, and Charles Isherwood noted that “[c]‌omplex matters of race, class and culture are handled with impeccable deftness,” as it reveals how racial prejudice fragments a community bound by privation in an age of globalization (n. pag.). In a working-​class bar in 2000 in Reading, we see bartender Stan welcoming in co-​workers and friends Tracey and Jessie, who are white, and Cynthia, who is African-​American. Jason and Chris, the adult sons of Tracey and Cynthia, are also friends, and everyone works the line together at Olstead’s factory, as has been the case for generations. Other figures populate the 292

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stage, including Brucie, Cynthia’s ex-​husband, who is on an extended walkout from another manufacturing plant and has become addicted to drugs; and Oscar, a quiet Latinx busboy. The play is framed by flash-​forward scenes from 2008, when Jason and Chris have just been released from jail for a crime about which we remain ignorant until the play’s end. Instead, the seemingly everyday action set in the year 2000 slowly stokes the tensions among the friends. Cynthia is promoted to manager; her attempts to convince her friends to take pay cuts only exacerbates Tracey’s resentment, convinced as she is that Cynthia was promoted because of her race. Olstead’s sends its machines to Mexico, locks the longtime workers out, and demands draconian pay and benefit cuts in order to keep the plant functional. When the union stages a walkout and management instead hires replacement workers from the Latinx community, things snap:  in a climactic scene, Jason comes after Oscar (who has secured a better-​paying job at the plant) with a bat, and Chris joins in. But it is Stan who, in trying to break up the fight, is hit in the head. We learn in the play’s closing moments that he has been severely disabled by a traumatic brain injury, and it is for this crime that Jason and Chris were jailed. The bar is a microcosm for both Reading and America; as in other literary works, the bar is an expression of local color, and a liminal place where those from disparate backgrounds can mingle. Here, while racial and ethnic backgrounds differ, the bar’s denizens are bound by class and a common plight as workers. Part of the play’s verisimilitude is also in acknowledging the racism and sexism that permeates the place it depicts. For example, Brucie tells the story of being at the union office signing up for some bullshit training and this old white cat, whatever, gets in my face, talking about how we took his job. We? I asked him who he was talking about, and he pointed at me. ME? So I said, if you ain’t noticed, I’m in the same fucking line as you. Hello?! (Nottage  37–​8) Tracey is hostile to Oscar, who tentatively approaches her early in the play to ask if the plant is hiring. From him, she learns Olstead’s is seeking non-​union workers in the Latinx community to undercut the union. Oscar, of Colombian descent and born in Berks County, later bitterly reflects on the community’s hostility: My father, he swept up the floor in a factory like Olstead’s –​those fuckas wouldn’t even give him a union card. But he woke up every morning at four A.M. because he wanted a job in the steel factory, it was the American way, so he swept fucking floors thinking, “One day they’ll let me in.” I know how he feels, people come in here every day. They brush by me without seeing me. No “Hello, Oscar.” If they don’t see me, I don’t need to see them. (Nottage 92) Yet Tracey can only regard his ambition without understanding, as suspect and a threat. While Tracey’s reaction to Cynthia’s promotion and Oscar’s aspirations expose her racism, Nottage compels a viewer to see it as complexly sourced. She has been subject to sexual harassment; as she tells Oscar: “You wanna know the truth, the only reason I didn’t get the job is because Butz tried to fuck me and I wouldn’t let him, and he told everyone in management that I’m unstable. I’m not unstable. I’m like –​” (Nottage 48). Nottage also allows Tracey a moment of lyrical nostalgia that helps explain her current fear. She remembers her “Opa,” part of the 293

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German community that founded the town, and the pride she once felt when, as a child, she accompanied him downtown: I felt really special, because he was this big, strapping man and people gave him room. But, what I really loved was that he’d take me to office buildings, banks…you name it, and he’d point out the woodwork. And if you got really, really close he’d show some detail that he’d carved for me. An apple blossom. Really.That’s what I’m talking about. It was back when if you worked with your hands people respected you for it. It was a gift. (Nottage 49) Even if Tracey herself cannot fully recognize the links between her family’s immigrant story and that of Oscar’s, and that she is making Oscar the visible scapegoat for economic forces neither can control and the loss of her own white privilege, Nottage still allows her grief and displacement to find expression. Ultimately, her rejection of the fight against a mutual, if not identical, oppression is tragic. At first, disability’s role in revealing these links feels promisingly political. In the year 2000 setting, for example, disability is shown to directly result from how companies consider workers’ bodies an expendable and disposable resource. Stan, who almost lost his leg in a plant accident, is glad his impairment got him out of the factory; Cynthia seeks a management position in part because her hands are becoming slowly disabled after years of repetitive motion. Nottage shows us stories of addiction that frame alcoholism and drug addiction as disabilities: they are mental, emotional, and physical illnesses exacerbated by despair and exhaustion. We see Jessie’s alcoholism triggered by the grind of intense labor, when she had instead hoped to travel the world with the husband who instead divorced her to marry a younger woman. Brucie is addicted to heroin, after having been locked out of work for months; “I useta make fun of cats like me,” he mourns (Nottage 43). Ironically, we learn it was fighting for the rights of a colleague who lost his hand that made Brucie a lion of labor activism. But now, he has himself become disabled through privation: I was doing my rotation on the line, same as always. And it began to rain, all at once a downpour, folks fled, but I…I just stood there…couldn’t move. I got soaked through to my skin. I still couldn’t move. And…and finally someone pulled me into the tent to get dry, but my whole body was shaking, wouldn’t stop. It was scary. And I hadn’t had that feeling of being outta control since my mother died. (Nottage 86) His fate prefigures Tracey’s: in 2008, we see that she has become addicted to opioids, ostensibly for back pain but also in response to the privation caused by the lockout. As the play wears on, however, the presence of disability shifts away from an identity interwoven into the social and economic plight of these characters and more toward stereotype. Disability becomes, in a fashion hearkening back to Richard III and Tiny Tim, shorthand for a character’s infamy or innocence:  for example, 2008 Tracey seems amply rewarded for her racism, becoming an addict so abject that she can only spare five dollars for the homeless Jason, demanding its repayment by the next day. By contrast, Stan is the play’s moral center: he is generally kind, and argues against systemic racism when Jason and Tracey vilify Oscar for crossing picket lines: “What the fuck do you want him to do? Huh? It ain’t his fault. Talk to Olstead, his cronies. Fucking Wall Street. Oscar ain’t getting rich off your misery” (Nottage 102). When 294

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we witness his TBI happen in gruesome, horrific detail, Nottage sets us up to see the other side of the stereotypical coin: if Tracey’s spectacle of disability marks her infamy, Stan’s marks his innocence. The final scene of the play, although brief, affirms this use of disability stereotype and thus powerfully undercuts the earlier complexity of the play’s use of disability. In 2008, Jason and Chris have met at the bar –​which is now gentrified, trendy, and managed by Oscar –​to try and discuss what happened. Before they can speak, however, the embodied consequence of their actions literally lurches in from the back of the bar: (A moment. Jason contemplates whether or not to leave. Then Stan, severely crippled, enters. A traumatic brain injury. He moves with extreme difficulty; it is painful to watch. Finally.)

CHRIS:  Hey, Stan. Stan. (Stan doesn’t register their presence.)

OSCAR:  He can’t really hear good. CHRIS: Jesus. (Stan goes about wiping tables.They all watch. Stan drops his cloth. He struggles to get it. Jason runs over and picks it up.)

STAN:  (Garbled): Thank…you. JASON:  It’s nice that you take care of him. OSCAR: That’s how it oughta be. (There’s apology in their eyes, but Chris and Jason are unable to conjure words just yet. The four men, uneasy in their bodies, await the next moment in a fractured togetherness. Blackout.) END OF PLAY (Nottage 112) Disability (problematically described as being “severely crippled”) is represented here as a cautionary tale:  do not foment hatred, or tragic disablement will be the result, falling on the innocent. I do not mean to deny the reality of physical, disabling violence as a result of racism; I also do not mean to deny innocent people are hurt by racism.Yet Stan’s whiteness reinscribes the unspoken notion that disability is a white identity, and displaces the many bodies of color disabled and erased by racial violence. Instead, the pathos of Stan’s entrance leaves the audience weeping (as they were in the performance I saw) over an individuated, sentimentalized image of disability. Up until Stan’s entrance, the fact that apparently nondisabled actors are playing disabled roles has an important ambiguity to it. We do not know that the actors’ bodies are not achy, disabled, or subject to addiction; this use of non-​apparent disability intriguingly complicates debates about what an “authentic” disability portrayal might look like, and whether it necessitates a disabled actor. But the portrayal of Stan falls firmly in the category of melodramatic “cripping up,” its depiction of traumatic brain injury meant to serve as symbolic shorthand rather than nuanced representation of disability. (While I have argued we do not know if the actor playing Stan is nondisabled, clearly he does not have a traumatic brain injury as debilitating as his 295

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character’s.) Indeed, the play seems to go out of its way to show that Stan is now the opposite of everything he once was, i.e., virile, strong, and flirtatious, since becoming severely disabled. His costume shifts from rugged working-​man’s chic to anonymous, all-​white clothing and heavy-​ looking therapeutic sneakers. He cannot hear, can barely speak, and moves in a tortured fashion, his injured arm held awkwardly against his chest. In short, disability is represented as emasculating and dehumanizing, its very presence upbraiding Jason and Chris. In the end, described as a moment of “fractured togetherness,” disability equals brokenness:  as broken as the trust, class, and race relationships in Reading, as broken as the men (although not the women) who share the final stage picture (Nottage 112). Stan’s damaged presence serves as symbol, moral rebuke, and implicit catalyst for change. But with it, it seems we are simply back in the terrain of narrative prosthesis, where disability creates a metaphorical opportunity within a narrative catalyzing the solution that solves the “problem” of its very existence (Mitchell and Snyder 47).We see this fully operational in this ending; there is the potential of progress, suggested through Oscar’s care of Stan: By [the end]…Oscar has literally switched positions with Stan. He is now the manager and weekend bartender, while a severely brain-​damaged Stan clumsily wipes the tables… .While Oscar symbolizes a rise in Latino business leadership in Reading, he also portends a recovered sense of humanity among these workers, whose lives have intersected in such tragic ways. (Mohler et al. 85–​6) But if there is progress to be had by the workers recognizing their commonality and caring for each other, disability will have no agency or presence within it. Kafer identifies this as a popular belief, one that denies a possibility of a “crip futurity”: If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed, it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future. The presence of disability, then, signals something else: a future that bears too many traces of the ills of the present to be desirable. (2) We have ended with an act of charity –​with pity, rather than empathy. Sweat calls for characters to make change by recognizing their interconnectedness, yet disavows disability either as a source for that change or importantly bound up in it.

Hir Taylor Mac’s Hir debuted in 2014, and had its New York premiere in 2015; it has since been performed in London and by prominent regional theaters including Chicago’s Steppenwolf and Washington, D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth. Generally well-​received, it has many thematic similarities to Sweat: both premise the necessity for imagining new futures in the face of violent social oppression, compelled by alliances across multiple identities. In the case of Hir, transgender identity becomes a model for wildly imagining beyond the patriarchy that has oppressed women, and queer and transgender people. Hir follows Isaac, a soldier who has been dishonorably discharged from the Marines on his first –​and, as it turns out, last –​day home with his family: father, Arnold; mother, Paige; and sibling, Max. He returns home to find transitions of

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all kinds; his once violent and abusive father has literally become disabled by the changes in the world that have disrupted his white, male privilege:

PAIGE:  He lost his job of thirty-​three years to a Chinese American woman. A plumber who is a Chinese American woman. It was fantastic. But bereft of you and his customers to spray his red-​faced spittle on, he doubled down on Max and me.Three times I had to take Max to the emergency room. Three times, Isaac. … . He couldn’t handle the pressure of actually having to change to keep up, so about a year ago, blood decided it wouldn’t go to his brain and he had a little stroke. (Mac 18, 19) Paige now revenge-​dresses Arnold in nightgowns, diapers, and clown makeup, feeding him estrogen to keep him docile; Max is the “hir” of the title who is now transitioning away from female. Paige has let the house fall into disarray; as she tells Isaac, “We don’t do cupboards any more. We don’t do order” (Mac 13). Instead, she says, “I’m all about the metaphor now,” determined as she is to blow up patriarchal order and celebrate what she heralds as the arrival of the new, embodied in her youngest child: “Max is the root of who we are. Truly. The root of who we are and the cusp of the new. There has never been any such thing as men and women and, Isaac, there never will be” (Mac 22). Ultimately, these disruptions prove too much for Isaac. While Paige and Max go out on “homeschool cultural outing day,” he tries to reorder the house by cleaning up, cooking, and reminding a confused Arnold what his role as a man once was: And you take up space. You sweat. You leave your mark. Yellow stains on everything white. Under your pits, around your collar, on the toilet seat.You dole out allowances and punishments.You give me, you give Mom, us, bruises, welts when we do things or when we’re too loud.You break our fingers if we leave a dirty dish in the sink. (Mac 53) When Paige and Max return, the inevitable confrontation happens. Paige angrily shows Isaac the holes in the walls the old Arnold made with his fists, depressions her body made being thrown up against the drywall, and explains why she wants to –​quite literally –​blow everything apart: He married me and built this because he thought we were things he could control. Cheap plywood and glue. This is the kind of house you can make a hole in from punching. That’s not a house. It’s him wanting to be more powerful than the home. Do we agree there is nothing to make from this? You want to be better? Go on a hunt for pipes, clog them up, and applaud as your father’s world explodes. Screw the Middle Class. WE ARE THE NEW. BEYOND GENDER. BEYOND POSSESSIONS. BEYOND THE  PAST. (Mac 85) But in this house, everything again devolves to violence: Arnold hits Paige, Paige hits Arnold, and Isaac finally has the massive PTSD explosion that has been building throughout the play: he punches Paige, then smashes an air conditioner with a bat. 297

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Paige then banishes Isaac from the house, believing him to be as much a casualty of toxic masculinity as those whose bodies he once retrieved: Wipe your tears. Pull yourself together and listen to me. It’s why we sent you, all the boys, to the wars to begin with. What do you do with the leftover pieces? You can pretend you will use them for something but you never will. At a certain point you have to dispose of them. … . You are no longer necessary. For the rest of your life you will pick up useless pieces. Mourn your dead.Your death. (Mac 87) Paige consigns Isaac to the ranks of the bus-​station addicts she made him pass in walking home. The play ends with a shattered Isaac, collateral damage of patriarchy, leaving, and Max tending gently to cleaning Arnold, who has wet himself out of fear, even as a sobbing Paige tells hir to “[l]‌et it rot” (Mac 89). Mac bluntly points out that the purpose of the play is to “tear apart the old regimes,” blowing up institutions of the kind in which the playwright was raised, and so in Hir we have “simply realistic characters in a realistic circumstance that is so extreme it is absurd” (Mac ix).The house is cheap plywood, built on a landfill, and has replicated itself in a neighborhood where everyone has “had to get three jobs, never see their kids, and still can’t make ends meet, all so they can keep their Formica countertops” (Mac 36). Paige refuses to enable class anxiety or play compliant housewife anymore and so the house, like compulsory domesticity for which it stands, is disintegrating: Dishes are piled up in the sink, cracking wallpaper and decade old stains, piles of laundry (to the point where it’s difficult to walk) are strewn about, and there seems to be a layer of dust on everything. It is an absolute disaster in terms of its disorder. (Mac 64) For Paige, there is exhilaration in throwing off old orders:  tutored by Max’s transition, she welcomes the sea change that Arnold feared: I discovered the most amazing thing, I [Isaac]. It used to be you could be a mediocre straight white man and be guaranteed a certain amount of success. But now you actually have to improve yourself. Because now…(in a mock horror movie trailer voice) The darkies have come. And the spics. And the queers. And those backstabbing bitches waiting to get at the mediocre white man the minute it becomes known he is barely lifting a finger but thinking he is lifting the world. (Mac 17) Paige and Max revel in the “paradigm shift” that is occurring in their house, and the rapid-​fire, pell-​mell creativity that they are engaging as an answer to that. Peter Marks observes that: [o]‌ne of the pleasures of Hir is that absolutely nothing is sacred. Whether it’s Isaac’s PTSD or Arnold’s infirmity or Paige’s efforts to find herself or even Max’s struggle to

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claim a new identity, Mac’s nihilistic perspective reminds you that all in the landscape of eternal sunshine is just groping in the dark (n. pag.). But in actuality, the play’s subversive quality rests firmly on its maintaining a highly conservative and traditional use of disability (suggested by Marks’ ableist use of blindness as an image of obliviousness); for instance, it is wielded in the play as comic effect. Arnold first appears eating “a bowl of mush, as someone with brain damage would,” while Paige treats him like a recalcitrant house pet, ordering him around and spraying him with a water bottle (Mac 5). Aphasiac and childlike, Arnold babbles and constantly holds his so-​called “best friend”: his penis. While Arnold implodes, Isaac explodes; soldiers in mortuary divisions (Isaac’s assignment) have some of the highest rates of PTSD in the armed forces, yet his is played for laughs. Dishonorably discharged for smoking methamphetamine through his anus, he keeps vomiting into a sink every time he hears a blender or hears about some way his home has changed; his aversion to literal and figurative fragmentation becomes a recurring comic bit. Disability is also the punishment rendered on all the characters who have engaged in a destructive version of masculinity that supports stereotypical ideas about what it means to be a “real man”: be “ ‘[t]‌ough, strong, never show weakness, win at all costs, suck it up, play through pain, be competitive, get rich, get laid’ ” (Kimmel and Wade 238).While Isaac notes that “[t]he only useful job you can have in the places where everything is blown up is to care for the pieces,” Paige will brook no pity:

PAIGE: To have empathy for some kid whose parents were blown to pieces by a fighter droid; that is a good thing. To have empathy for a man who hoards patriarchal privilege; that is bolstering his dominion. And we are not about shoring up [indicating house] this. We’re on a perpetual trip to bolster the new. (Mac 82) Even as Isaac cries for help, Paige sends him away, acidly saying “I would tell you to kill yourself but I don’t want to clean the mess” (Mac 79). Neither Isaac nor Arnold are part of a crip futurity; Isaac is banished to be “on the street…with your brothers and your fathers and your ruined…possibilities” while Arnold is last pictured having wet himself, regressed to the status of a whimpering infant (Mac 87). The men are literally blown to pieces, unable ever to be reassembled into something new. The choice to make Isaac a veteran returning from Marine Mortuary Affairs duty is particularly fraught beyond the comic use of PTSD. In using Isaac’s military service to critique toxic masculinity, Mac perpetuates the way, stretching back to World War I, in which American society has feared what historian John Kinder calls the “Problem of the Disabled Veteran.” This “problem” consists in the way that, according to Kinder, “many in the United States came to associate war-​related disability with a host of social ills: pathological dependency, compromised masculinity, and the crippling legacies of foreign intervention” (3–​4). Paige’s angry rejection of Isaac represents his wounds as a personal failing, and implies the same to be true of all traumatized soldiers. His disappearance will only contribute to a state of affairs in which: “[t]‌he high rates of homelessness and substance abuse among Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans suggests that many are in danger of disappearing altogether, swallowed up in the permanent underclass that has come to define large segments of twenty-​first century American society” (Kinder 297).The deep irony is that in revealing how she has been abused for years, and subject to her own physical and mental disablement, Paige still maintains a deep disability hierarchy between “innocent” 299

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and “guilty” victims –​and, in so doing, perpetuates a powerfully ableist (not to mention, ironically, a highly patriarchal) status quo. Hir also ignores important ways in which trans identity and disability are interwoven. Eli Clare reminds us that both identities have been circumscribed within the medical-​industrial complex as needing cure: “Until the early 1990s, when trans communities began finding strong, collective voices, medical providers’ explicit goal for gender transition was to create normal heterosexual men and women who never again identified as trans, gender-​nonconforming, gay, lesbian, or bi” (Brilliant 178). Hir suggests progress in this regard; Max refuses such binaries, evoking a world with more gender possibilities, as hir mother joyfully observes: “There are no longer two genders. No longer simply a Y and X chromosome but an alphabet of genders.They call it the LGBTTSQQIAA community” (Mac 21). The disabling changes Isaac and Arnold undergo, by contrast, are not transformations to be understood or embraced, but rather, symbolic of and the outcome of pathology, to be endured until the characters either disappear or die. Max’s change is posited with whimsy and humor, but what about the experiences of trans viewers for whom the difficulties of transition go beyond whether they can learn to play the banjo and yearn to join a “commune…for anarchist queers” (Mac 46)? The medical aspects of Max’s transitioning, being on what Paige calls the “mones” (hormones), is treated for humorous effect rather than introduced as a disability issue; there’s no real exploration of that paradox Clare points out, that transitioning can require a complex negotiation between eschewing the ableist language of transition-​as-​cure and embracing medical intervention. The play thus perfectly embodies a state of affairs trans disabled scholar Alexandre Baril decries: “Not only is the question of disability forgotten [in trans studies and activism], but the quest to depathologise trans identities also often uses disabled people for its own purposes” (64).

Conclusion I want to end this analysis of Hir and this essay, however, offering a bit of hope. The exploration of intersectionality with disability is vital if political projects of representation are not to reproduce ableist ideas that are repressive. Where the ending of Sweat denied crip futurity, I do think that the very final image of Hir hints at a very different intersection of disability with othered identities. After Paige has kicked out Isaac, Max goes worriedly to the window, upset that Isaac has passed out of view. Although Paige tries to rationalize her choice, Max is having none of it:

Max:  I don’t want to be here. Paige: You don’t have to be. Max:  I don’t wanna be here with any of this. Paige: Good. Max : There are places where it’s easier. Where people aren’t like this. Paige:  I know. Max :  It, you, it’s all debris. (Mac 88) Max has recognized Paige’s part in perpetuating as patriarchal a world as Arnold had. Whereas before ze celebrated the “karma” that led hir to follow Paige’s lead and alternately torment and abandon Arnold, ze seems to have recognized the ways in which this perpetuates destruction. Paige has insisted that Arnold “has not earned the right to be cared for,” but the play closes with Max transitioning in a different way: toward ethical caregiving (Mac 43). The play closes with Max tenderly cleaning Arnold: “Arnold puts his arms up and Max takes his wet nightgown off (he 300

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wears a diaper underneath). Max brushes Arnold’s hair down, calms him, and starts to clean up the urine with a nearby towel” (Mac 89). What we are left with is an image of one vulnerable body caring for another across difference, not because Arnold merits it, but because his is a body in crisis. The ending is still fraught: Arnold is still a disabled body played for spectacle by a nondisabled actor, and made particularly abject in the end. But Mac underscores the act of Max’s purposeful turning away from Paige and her bankrupt definitions of the new. Max will not enjoy the approbation of anyone for hir act of pity, yet ze chooses to ally herself with precarity and community, rather than continuing to simply reverse power relationships. Ironically, at the moment Hir seems to cement ableism and humiliation, it also hints at what might be initiated by approximating an ethos of disability. What would Hir and Sweat look like –​indeed, what kind of transformational power could they wield –​if they could, in fact, imagine disability in ways that make it more visible as a social and relational identity, one implicated in and essential to the fight against wide-​scale oppression? As literary critics, teachers, and artists, we have a responsibility to understand that identities are contentious, contestable, and intersectional. One of the critical things that disability studies offers us as readers is the awareness that representations that otherwise purport to be progressive often build their liberation on the continued subjugation of disability. And since representation creates reality, this has material consequences in the world beyond the boundaries of the stage. All this is not to say that disability should be romanticized, or that disabled characters must either be inspirational or always have happy fates. But as we contemplate the good that intersectional representations can do, neither must disabled characters, and the lives they represent, be vilified and erased. To understand how disability is intimately bound up in –​and indeed, has been used to help create –​outmoded ideas about race, class, gender, and sexuality, is to increase liberation for all bodies, and to imagine a future in which disability identity is visible, vibrant, and valued.

Works cited Baril, Alexandre. “Transness as Debility:  Rethinking Intersections between Trans and Disabled Embodiments.” Feminist Review 111 (2015): 59–​74. Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Duke University Press, 2017. —​—​—​. “Excerpt from: Digging Deep: Thinking about Privilege,” eliclare.com, 2003, www.eliclare.com/​ what-​eli offers/​lectures/​privilege. Accessed 24 Sept. 2017. Erevelles, Nirmala. “Thinking with Disability Studies.” Disability Studies Quarterly 34:2 (2014), http://​dsq-​ sds.org/​article/​view/​4248/​3587. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Fox, Ann.“Fabulous Invalids Together: Why Disability in Mainstream Theater Matters.” Disability,Avoidance, and the Academy: Challenging Resistance, eds. David Bolt and Clare Penketh. Routledge, 2015: 122–​32. Goodley, Dan. “Dis/​entangling Critical Disability Studies.” Disability & Society 28:5 (2013): 631–​44. Isherwood, Charles. “Lynn Nottage’s Sweat Examines Lives Unraveling by Industry’s Demise,” The New York Times, 16 Aug. 2015, www.nytimes.com/​2015/​08/​17/​theater/​review-​lynn-​nottages-​sweat-​ examines-​lives-​unraveling-​by-​industrys-​demise.html?mcubz=1. Accessed 15 Aug. 2017. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013. Kimmel, Michael, and Lisa Wade. “Ask a Feminist:  Michael Kimmel and Lisa Wade Discuss Toxic Masculinity.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44:1 (2018): 233–​54. Kinder, John. Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran.” University of Chicago Press, 2015. Mac, Taylor. Hir. Northwestern University Press, 2015. Marks, Peter. “Taylor Mac’s play ‘Hir’ Shows an America That’s Groping in the Dark for Its Moral Identity,” The Washington Post, 29 May 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/​entertainment/​theater_​dance/​taylor-​ macs-​ p lay- ​ h ir-​ s hows- ​ a n- ​ a merica- ​ t hats- ​ g roping- ​ i n- ​ t he- ​ d ark- ​ f or- ​ i ts- ​ m oral- ​ i dentity/ ​ 2 017/ ​ 0 5/​ 29/​fc1ba826-​4491-​11e7-​98cd-​af64b4fe2dfc_​story.html?utm_​term=.ecc20115c184. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.

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25 PUPPETS, PLAYERS AND THE POETICS OF VULNERABILITY Hijinx’s Meet Fred and new directions in the theatres of learning disability Matt Hargrave

This chapter reframes learning disability as an aesthetic potential, rather than a pervasive social burden or injury. This is in opposition to an often-​patronising standpoint that sees theatre, whether via advocacy or therapy, as something that gives learning disabled persons “a voice”. It involves a close examination of a single live performance and demonstrates that theatre has the potential to radically undermine normative misperceptions of learning disabled persons. These misperceptions include: an inept social identity; an unproductive and overly dependent way of being which makes such persons burdensome and of secondary cultural value. My goal here is to show how performance can both utilse and develop new ways of considering issues of personhood, care and authorship. Four key principles underpin the writing: first, that dominant existing theories (social and medical models) are inadequate as a means of reflecting on work of increased aesthetic complexity; second, that cognitive disability can be viewed as aesthetic potential in works of art, as much as societal stigma in real life; third, that any understanding of contemporary artworks must be rooted in a genealogy of the cultural forms that learning disability has engendered in history; and fourth, that debates about aesthetic quality and the making of value judgements are vital to the appreciation and development of theatres involving learning disabled artists. Such an approach is grounded in critical disability studies, which distances itself from both medical and social models and is most clearly articulated by Margrit Shildrick, who speaks not to “an absolute difference between those who are disabled and are those who are not but rather to a deeply disconcerting intimation of commonality” (4). In sum, she argues that disability can no longer be reduced to a binary difference; rather its appearance highlights the profound interconnectedness of all identity; all persons should be validated as desiring subjects; non-​disabled persons have as much right –​and responsibility –​to speak about these issues as disabled persons; and that all these issues are more complex than material exclusion (and thus cannot be “solved” purely through redistribution of resources).

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This standpoint is useful when analysing artworks which are highly collaborative in nature, such as the play Meet Fred (2017), which I utilise as a case study. Meet Fred by Hijinx Theatre, based in Cardiff, Wales, was made in collaboration with puppet company, Blind Summit, and is an apt example of the opportunites that are generated by a close reading of a live artwork. It is a show about a puppet, Fred, who comes to life at the start of a show with no idea who or what he is.Visually, he is a simple Bunraku training puppet, who has to create both the play and his own identity as he goes along. Fred is a cloth puppet with no joints or distinguishable features. Blind Summit use such puppets as training tools in their style of Bunraku, a fact amplified at a late point in the show when Fred is revealed to be one of a dozen puppets in a box: not even a “real” puppet but a preparation for one. He is never anything but a puppet. As he is made aware from the start:

Fre d:  But you’re the Director, what do you want me to do? Director :  No I need it to come from you. Fre d: What? Director :  Look Fred, you’re a blank canvas… Fre d: Literally Fred is, literally, a tablua rasa: a image on which to project. As the play, both slyly and raucously, encourages the spectator into believing, he is also a metaphor for the journey of a learning disabled protagonist through life: he must make his way through various picaresque adventures –​a difficult birth; a growing awareness that he is different from the people around him; the difficulty of finding employment; of finding love; and finally an ambiguous suicide attempt –​in constant need of support by willing others, in this case, three puppeteers, a director, a stage manager and his own maker. Although deliberately told as an irreverent, surreal fairy tale, the play makes its politics plain: Fred is forced to go looking for work under the threat of losing his “PLA” (Puppet Living Allowance). The mise-​en scene is dominated by three huge blackboards on which the possible scenes of the show are written in chalk and constantly referred back to, for example, “Date Night”; “Prison”; “Dream Sequence”; “Waking up Routine”. The fact that some of them do not happen (“Prison” for example) adds to the sense of playful chaos and dislocation. They represent not just the fragmented narrative but the absurdity of the bureaucracy that surround Fred: the need to look for work which will simultaneously irradicate his benefits. I argue that the play depends on both an audience’s attachment to a non-​human transitional object (the puppet, Fred); and on the projection of Fred onto the human actor (Gareth John) who has Down’s syndrome –​a visible or “legible” disabilty –​and who thus share a common vulnerability. It is the relationship between the human and the non-​human (or the projected human) onstage which allows the play to embody what I refer to as a poetics of vulnerability: the aesthetic manifestation of shared human experience, which can never exist autonomously. This chapter contends that learning disability, and vulnerability more widely, is an interruptive value, both socially (because it upsets the myth of the autonomous self) and aesthetically (since it opens up the closed aesthetic artefact); furthermore, that it invites spectators’ complicity; and that vulnerability  –​like puppetry  –​openly avows support structures usually hidden in public performance. To speak of intellectually disabled performers is to speak of adults whom society defines as vulnerable:  vulnerable to physical attack, verbal insult; to cultural, social and genetic erasure. These themes recur continually in mainstream media. Criticism of Sally Philips’ 2016 BBC

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documentary, A World Without Down’s Syndrome, centred on a perception of the film as one-​ sided, and somehow against the rights of women to make their own choice: …the big conflict for women is the adult the child will be in 20 or 30 years down the line. For most women, that is the bit that tips them to end the pregnancy. An adult who will be at best vulnerable. (Jane Fisher, Director of Antenatal Results and Choices, UK, quoted in McVeigh 2016) Strange that:  “an adult who will be at best, vulnerable”, as if that is the lowest expectation of a human. But at our best, we are all vulnerable. That is what makes us human, allows us to connect with others. I  contend that any discussion of inclusion or access should also rethink issues of human fragility, precarity, risk, care and connectedness. The word “inclusion” often attains great irony; for example, when used to describe punishment spaces in UK schools which are known as “inclusion rooms”. Exclusion is always included in inclusion. In the index of my previous book (Hargrave 2015) the word “inclusion” appears, by chance, between “improvisation” and “incubus”. At its most creative, inclusion forces us to improvise: to translate, to listen closely to others, to unblock, encouraging new insight and spontaneity. As incubus, inclusion creates difficulty and anxiety. Inclusion always involves a disruption of the everyday dramaturgy. Vulnerability is built into theatrical dramaturgy. Public performance does away with the safety net of script and rehearsal room and transports its actors into places unknown: strange buildings, new people, watchful eyes, friendly at first yet expected to cast a critical eye. The presence of disabled performers on a public stage is an opportunity, then, to think about how social vulnerability might be perceived, but also to think about the power of performance to circumvent the more negative connotations of that vulnerability. In what follows I  engage closely with Erinn Gilson’s work on vulnerability:  her refusal to accept the normative frame of vulnerability as a given, but rather to examine how vulnerability is constructed as a problem. Gilson’s eloquent and exhaustive Ethics of Vulnerability (2013) explores the implications of three assertions:  first, that the normative equivalence of vulnerability with weakness devalues vulnerability as something socially “bad”, to be disavowed where possible; second, that vulnerability can be viewed as an ethical resource that helps manifest virtues of empathy; and third, that vulnerability is often reduced to a state of perpetual risk (a rather than productive potential). I argue that a fourth implication arises from this critical work: that vulnerability is an aesthetic resource. The chapter expands these questions afresh to consider how the play deals with personhood. What is a moral person? What is a puppet? What is a knowing subject? What does it mean, both for puppet and play, to be –​or to act –​self-​aware? The chapter draws on Michael Bérubé’s The Secret Life of Stories (2018), which seeks to release intellectual disability from its representation in literature, and rather consider how it permeates form: specifically, how fictional “deployments” of disability go beyond rendering or diagnosing of disabled characters and become narrative strategies which explore human thought and experience. In this chapter I consider how self-​ reflexive storytelling and puppetry are deployed within the narrative fiction to enable us to think again about how personhood (knowing, rational, autonomous) is constructed. The very notion of being a person in one’s own right is complicated by intellectual disabilities, not least because of the role of significant others and carers in the making of everyday decisions. By taking the more generative aspects of vulnerability as a starting point it may be possible to see such questions afresh: to think about how shared responsibilities are acted through the drama, to think about personhood as always in relation to, as opposed to independent from, others.

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Vulnerability as interruptive value Meet Fred is a self-​reflexive picaresque comic epic which begins with the birth of Fred.

Fre d: This is a show…about me?…I don’t know anything about myself! I don’t know anything about the show! Director: Well that’s up to you Fred, it’s your show Fre d:  Hang on, why don’t I have a script? Director: You don’t need a script Fre d: What do you mean I don’t need a script? Fred doesn’t know who he is. The play breaks with the unity of the proper or the orderly and composes itself via juxtaposition and interruption. It achieves its effects by continually undoing the proper play: the story of Fred’s journey through the world.This is the first principle of what I will call the poetics of vulnerability: that vulnerability is an interruptive value. These constant shifts of mood and perspective do not just undo the aesthetic but point also to vulnerability as a frame: that is, a fixed, uninterrupted state, rather than a set of contextual relations. They enhance, rather than undermine, vulnerability, since they demonstrate how survival is so often underpinned by dark comedy, itself a distancing device. The show is based on a conceit: the meta-​theatrical device of interrupting Fred’s journey with interjections from the director, Ben Pettitt-​Wade, who becomes increasingly frustrated by Fred’s criticisms of the way his story is working out; and also by the ineptitude of the stage manager, Martin (Gareth John), who is the only identifiable learning disabled performer. Whilst “Martin” has less stage time than Fred, his presence and ongoing struggle with the director is no less vital and compelling. Martin is treated to a series of worsening criticisms by the director, which culminates towards the end of the show in a staged walkout. The show derives both its comedy and its discomfort from the direct abuse which both Fred and Martin suffer at the hands of the director. As Pettitt-​Wade’s fictional director states in the show: I’ve had enough of this, Martin, all you’ve had to do is move a couple of boxes about, and you can’t even do that, you’ve been peeping though the back, walking back and forth, we can see you, you know, you’re not invisible, everything I’ve asked you to do you’ve fucked up, look Martin, just fuck off. Within the context of the show this is both hilarious and deeply uncomfortable. It is left to Fred to resolve the tension by cleverly inviting Martin to become one of his puppeteers:

Fre d:  Martin, you said you wanted to be my legs, why don’t you be my legs? M arti n: The Director said I wasn’t good enough I’m not good enough! Fre d:  Don’t listen to the Director, he’s gone now anyway, which means you’re in charge. You can do what you like, if you want to be my legs, you can be my legs. The two characters are entwined. It is Martin as Stage Manager who carefully brings the puppet onstage at the start and who takes him off at the end.Yet the constant message, relayed by others, is that they are less than competent. As the director says to Fred, “You’re not even a real puppet, you’re just a prototype.” Judith Butler argues that frames –​intellectual frames: how we view the world –​provide conditions of intelligibility and thus “organise visual experience” (3). Dramaturgical choices 306

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frame the way one views a work, but prior to this one already has a view of what the frame should be. Normative ideas about vulnerability –​weakness, individual tragedy –​frame the way we look at vulnerability: the frame is not neutral. Thus, the job of criticism is to lay bare the device, so to speak, to reveal what is usually taken for granted. Meet Fred continually undoes any attempt at a closed –​or normative –​aesthetic system. Each frame is continually being undone by another: the frame of the stage manager, who brings the puppet onstage; the frame of the puppeteers who greet the audience as “themselves”; the frame of the puppet who invites us into a fictional realm; the frame of the director who interrupts the action onstage; the frame of the sign interpreter who watches and reports back on the action silently. At one stage, Fred’s maker –​a director surrogate –​shows Fred that this is “just” a play. She goes offstage and opens the door to the outside world. She then reveals herself as not even his maker, as “just” an actress. Even more startling is the end of the play, in which we see Fred seemingly flying, able to achieve his dreams, to be, as he tells Martin, anything he wants to be. But the play never allows us to settle in a comfortable illusory world: the house lights come on. Fred acknowledges he is a puppet who cannot fly. He falls to the ground. End of play: a kind of botched, ironic suicide. The play never allows the audience to settle in a single system of representation. Bérubé makes a vital connection between narrative self-​reflexivity and learning disabilty. Via an analysis of a wide range of literary texts, Bérubé conveys frequent instances where the presence of a learning disabled character in a narrative leads to, or is concurrent with, literary self-​reflexivity (metafictional conceit; doubling of authorship; and proliferation of texts within texts, leading to narrative irony): Each of these narratives  –​Curious Incident, Don Quixote, Henry IV, and Galaxy Quest –​involves a character or characters (in one case, a narrator) whose intellectual disability entails a diminished or non-​existent capacity for metarepresentation, and who thereby (a) produce metafictional textual effects, and (b) in the course of producing metafictional effects, break their narratives’ fictional frame in such a way to confirm it. (144) For Bérubé, such devices point to wider questions of consciousness, about who is capable of self-​consciousness and those who “cannot fully account for themselves” (122). In theatre, such metafictional effects are strongly present not just in Meet Fred, but in other recent works featuring learning disabled artists. Australian company Back to Back’s Ganesh and the Third Reich (2012) is based on the conceit of the actors purporting, for large sections of the piece, to portray “themselves” rehearsing the play. (Actor Scott Price claims at one point that his colleague Mark Deans cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality, that “Mark’s mind is probably working like a goldfish”.) British company Mind the Gap’s Contained (2015) played endlessly with slippages in real and stage time, often mediated by live-​action recordings of the stage as the play advanced. In both cases, the shows were responses to the question of authorial ownership. Ganesh grew out of an experience the company had touring the previous work (Food Court 2009) when Artistic Director Bruce Gladwin was asked by staff in one of the receiving venues to clarify if the ensemble knew whether or not they were acting. Contained was an attempt to transition from the strongly fictionalised world of previous shows by focusing on the individual personas of the ensemble. It is relevant, then, that some spectators I spoke with felt uncomfortable with the fact that the learning disabled actor in Meet Fred had comparatively little stage time and played a menial role. In the case of Meet Fred it is relevant to note that spectators –​myself included –​often make assumptions about who does or does not “have” a disability. The show, in point of fact, featured two actors (Richard Newnham and Lindsay Foster) who identify as 307

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Asperger’s. Pettitt-​Wade reports that several spectators did not think these actors had disability because “they were such good actors” (“Interview”). It is also relevant that much of the material set in the Jobseeker’s centre was closely based on Newnham’s own experience: I think this balance is important to state in terms of the making of the show and ownership –​in truth scenes like the Job Centre scene came entirely from Richards own experience with the benefits system as a person with Asperger’s, the only difference being that he gets to turn the tables and take on a position of power in the show. He has said himself in many Q&A’s that he saw this as an opportunity to vent his frustration and inject as much venom into the character of Jack as he had been subjected to. (Pettitt-​Wade “Email Correspondence”) What I  want to explore is the question of why the metafictional devices mentioned above are present and what they generate aesthetically. One answer to this question has to do with fools. The theatrical fool has always strained the boundary between on-​and offstage, and often functions dramatically as a punctum indifferens: a still point of reflection amid chaos. It is well known that Shakespeare’s fools exist both inside and outside the play proper, allowing the author a chance to comment on the work. In King Lear (1606), the fool has attained the power to comment on tragedy in a way that no other character could. As George Orwell notes: The fool is integral to the play. He acts not only as a sort of chorus, making the central situation clearer by communicating it more intelligently than the other characters, but as a foil to Lear’s frenzies. His jokes, riffles, scraps of rhyme, and his endless digs at Lear’s high-​minded folly […] are like a trickle of sanity running through the play, a reminder that somewhere or other in spite of injustices, cruelties, intrigues, deceptions and misunderstandings that are being enacted here, life is going on much as usual. (42) Orwell argues that the fool is the author’s mouthpiece for subversive social commentary and that “if he had been forced to take sides in his own plays, his sympathies would probably have lain with the fool” (49). Two main principles may be drawn here: first, that the fool is not just part of, but constitutive of theatre; and second, that the aesthetic value of the fool’s role is rooted in, and draws power from, a radical ambiguity. Perhaps the essential ambiguous question of Meet Fred is: Who is my creator? Who is the one who knows? The proliferation of authority figures who purport to know (directors; puppet controllers; Jobseeker’s bureaucrats; fictional creators; stage managers) represent the very real lived existence of learning disabled persons who exist in a world of urgent co-​dependency; but it also points to a wider philosophical question: What does it mean to know? And how can you trust the ones meant to know? The events of the play undermine a belief in knowledge providers: they carry out their prescribed social role with cruel impunity (the bureaucrat); they take out their frustration on their employees (the director); they leave you more lost and alone and confused than before (your creator). They stare and laugh sometimes but don’t intervene when you need their help (the audience). This leads to the formal aesthetic question: Whose show is this anyway? Author/​authority are entwined. This hints at the second answer as to why the metafictional elements are so crucial, which is related to more prosaic questions of time and rehearsal economics: the original desire of the company for the puppeteers to be drawn from the company of learning disabled actors proved impossible. When working on the show, Blind Summitt engaged in a training programme with the actors, and it soon became apparent that the time needed to train to be a Bunraku puppeteer was in excess of the actors’  –​indeed most actors’  –​capabilities and would not have 308

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allowed them time to make the play. The show’s comic energy, that rough “up against the wall” quality it possesses, is derived in part from the exigencies of having to make a show when one’s original plan has collapsed. The endless self-​reflexivity is built into the texture of the show due to the creative process which allows for the rich inter-​subjective aesthetic experience that the show becomes: the interruptive, bawdy interplay between very different minds, crafts and desires. As Pettitt-​Wade acknowledges, the company’s work is not “disabled-​led” but rather collaborative (“Interview”). The process of making the show was a response to a series of very practical problems: How do we link the scenes together? (Answer: bring in the director.) What does Martin do if he is not operating the puppet’s feet? (Answer: we need a stage manager.) What is the relationship between the director and the stage manager? (Answer: difficult, hierarchical.) This is not to suggest that Meet Fred is somehow “accidental” in its aesthetics; more that the company are alert to the possibility of creating meaning within the contingency. What the company profess to look for is “an edge to the work that is the opposite of safe or worthy” (Pettitt-​Wade “Interview”). This, I argue, is productive aesthetic terrain and also supports –​in material form –​Margrit Shildrick’s assertion that the appearance of disability highlights the profound interconnectedness of all identity: that disabled bodies disrupt “the putative norm of the autonomous subject” (179). Indeed, the injunction to make a show is to ask the question, what kind of a show is this? It is also to ask, what is my relationship to you? How might we make something out of that relationship that is neither you nor me, but represents something else, some other third thing: a material response to Quayson’s idea of “hermeneutical impasse” that is disability (52). Arguably, performance –​as opposed to political advocacy –​is the primary place where meaningful change can occur in one’s perception. This is because performance, as David George notes, “offers a rediscovery of the now…rediscovery that all knowledge exists on the threshold of and in the interaction between subject and object” (25). This is felt deeply in the relationship between the puppeteers and the puppet. At the beginning of the play, as Fred gradually and fearfully becomes self-​aware, the interaction between subject and object becomes so blurred as to be illusory. The emotional energy invested in the puppet makes him live.

Vulnerability as complicity The self-​reflexive impulse of the show can also be viewed through the lens of philosopher Bruce Baugh’s notion of authenticity, which is located not in the body of the performer, or in the truth of the representation. It is located rather in the artifice of the work itself. For Baugh, “works of art have a ‘world’ that they can make ‘their own’ by revealing it in a singular manner and […] it is in this that artistic authority consists” (479). Art does more than simply represent: it transforms the spectator. It does so paradoxically, not by the intended transmission of a “message” but conversely by suspending the need for such a definitive outcome. Meet Fred is authentic because it is a “made thing”, something that is intentionally willed into existence. It is precisely this intention that allows it to be perceived as art. The show also defined its own world: it created an opportunity for a new space to emerge outside existing social constructions. Baugh argues that artworks transform our experience when we “adopt what we take to be the work’s organizing principle, and allow it to order our experience” (480). This distinction between our own ends and the ends of the work is crucial. Only by relinquishing a wish for the work to be “useable”, Baugh argues, can spectators truly allow themselves to be transformed (481). The end of the work cannot be known by the makers or by the recipient, but only experienced in the moment of the work’s reception. Baugh’s model of authenticity offers considerable theoretical insight. Baugh argues that the audience must “strive to meet” the “demands 309

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of the work”, allowing those demands to govern them during the course of the work (481). This highlights a primary issue in the formulation of appropriate critical frameworks: because learning disability is such a contested and unstable category, theatre has a role to play, not just in exploring identity but in ensuring that audiences are implicated in the telling. This is vital because disability is not a “disabled person’s problem”: it is, ideally, a shared contemplation about human difference. Disability implicates everyone and this is a formal question as much as an ethical one. The moment of “not seeing” the disability (in two of the actors) can be read as a failure of perception, leading to an erroneous judgement (about how much disability was in the show) but it begs the question, what was there to see? When disability is seen, what exactly is there to see? And if it is missed, what is it that is missing? Justice is perhaps a commitment to seeing –​and not seeing –​in all its complexity, to look beyond the surface of what one already knows, or has been taught to know. The show demands self-​reflexivity by its audience. Such questions of metafictional device and self-​reflexivity, then, are not only relevant for aesthetic reasons: in laying bare the device, so to speak, I argue that the play invites the spectator to become critically aware, not just of the story and its themes, but of her own complicity. Any singular, and thus reductive, meaning of vulnerability is ruptured by the constant interaction between Fred and his co-​performers and the audience. A normative reading (or performing) of vulnerability would single out Fred –​or Gareth John –​as the “vulnerable one”, different in essence from the powerful director, or indeed the autonomous spectators. Such a reading would be wholly in keeping with normative assumptions that seek to close down a nuanced engagement with vulnerability. Meet Fred circumvents this model in several ways. The most obvious way this happens is the tendency for both Fred and Martin to talk back. At the end of the play, it is not Ben the director, but Martin, who is left standing. Despite the director’s injunction that he is not good enough to be a puppeteer, he ends the show as one. The message is clear, as Martin states: “Fuck the director!” The play experiments with its own sense of imminent collapse. Alan Read comments that: [w]‌hen something goes wrong in the theatrical fiction, a corpse here, a collapse there, it rarely forces cancellation but an increased level of attention and participation from the audience. (53–​54) This fact is something that corresponds with Meet Fred, where, not failure exactly, but accidents and contradictions –​a sense of broad chaos –​certainly contribute to the work’s complexity. A  poetics of vulnerability might recognise, but not privilege, mastery of technique or perfection. If ineptitude, forgetfulness or lack of finesse are aesthetic qualities that increase audience attention, then these should be examined, developed, even celebrated. It is a strength of the show that the form allows highly virtuosic puppetry to stand side by side with non-​ virtuosic performance, with no loss of aesthetic cohesion. It is as if each performer has found an optimum place on a shared stage. The work encourages the spectator into a series of allusions and metaphors. By distancing one from the subject of disability, the play, ironically, brings into sharp focus the moral imperative of disabilty –​how to live with and to support others. A further component of complicity lies in the constant laughter that the show produces. In the shared mirth, embarrassment and absurdity, the audience is always present as an active, vocal soundtrack. There were times when I laughed because I wasn’t sure if I was witnessing abuse of a stage manager by an irate director.Yet this merely adds to the sense of complicity: by remaining seated, by accepting the safety of the fiction, by laughing awkwardly, I still remained alert to the possibility that things might get out of hand: a walkout by the actors; a complaint by an audience member. Perhaps this is related to the residue of feeling that at some level the 310

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learning disabled performer does not consciously know that he is acting, that this verbal abuse may be being experienced as authentic pain. It is a measure of Gareth John’s skill that there was a moment when he continued to beat himself saying “Stupid! Stupid!” that I genuinely feared he was suffering. I think that this is what makes Meet Fred so powerful: that the themes of vulnerability are presented through the lens of broad comedy: in essence, a fool show.

Vulnerability as structural support Puppets, of course, are surrogate objects. Fred is a puppet who passes for a person; a very particular type of person: one who requires three puppet support workers, which he risks losing, along with his Puppet Living Allowance, if he refuses to take a job he doesn’t want: that of a children’s entertainer. This is all due to the unpleasant vagaries of the DWP: the Department for Work and Puppets. The play demonstrates that support is a shifting currency. Support can be given freely; it can also be bought, at a cost. And it can be taken away. This need for support makes Fred vulnerable. It also makes him human. Heinrich von Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionette Theatre” (1810), is a short, enigmatic work that takes the form of a story: a meeting between the author, von Kleist, and “an old friend” who is a “principal dancer in the local theatre […] enjoying immense popularity” yet fascinated by the more commercial puppet shows in the marketplace (1). The friend claims that he is in awe of the “mute gestures of these puppets” and that “any dancer who wished to perfect his art could learn a lot from them” (1). This sly essay turns accepted notions of virtuosity on its head: puppets have the “proportion, flexibility, lightness…all to a higher degree” (3); they are “never guilty of affectation”; and “grace appears most purely in that human form which has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness.That is, in a puppet or a God” (5).That which puppets offer –​that human actors cannot –​is performance free from the strictures of the self. The puppet, incapable of affectation, is a mirror image of one idea –​or perhaps misconception –​of the learning disabled actor. This is exactly the point made by Nicholas Ridout, in his reading of Kleist: that “the self-​ consciousness that follows ‘the fall’, involves […] representation” (17). The puppet shares with the learning disabled performer an unrepresented or unmediated presence:  in other words, he is the blank slate on which to project. What Kleist’s argument overlooks is that “puppets only achieve their transcendence of human gracelessness by means of human labour” (26). The mechanics of puppetry belie the myth of smooth, untroubled autonomous creativity. It is not that the puppet is so radically different. What is so shocking is that the puppet and the human actor share the same fate: continual nightly repetition supported via a network of levers that remain hidden due to the willing suspension, not of belief, but of economic reality. Perhaps, then, it is of more than passing significance that Martin, the only learning disabled performer in the show, has the role of Stage Manager, or to put it more literally, Props Master, or metaphorically: Master of Support. Because this is what vulnerability does: it reavows structural support. What the show does, very effectively, is mediate these aesthetic questions back into the political realm. As Jack, the sinister Jobseeker’s officer, says (played by Newnham):

Jack:  If you do not take a job you will lose one of your puppeteers. Fre d: What? You…you can do that? Jack:  Of course I can. In the climate we live in something has to give, and you, and your three puppeteers here are a luxury. Fre d:  But Jack, you can’t just…But, do you not see, if you take away one of my puppeteers it makes it even harder for me to get about, even harder to get a job. 311

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This problem is not limited to the “real world”. As the following dialogue makes clear, Fred, like his learning disabled human shadow, Martin, doesn’t get paid for his nightly labour.

Director :  It’s not that we don’t want to pay you. It’s just, well, it’s better for you if we don’t…it’s complicated. Fre d: What? Stop saying it’s complicated…how can it be complicated? Director :  OK fine! Look, if we paid you what we should be paying you, you’d have to sign off your PLA, which is fine because you’re getting paid yeah, but once the tour is over you’ll have to go back to DWP… In both these excerpts Meet Fred opens up questions about what constitutes support or indeed justice, but also about what constitutes a play, and what support a play needs. When I  saw the show in 2017, the actor Gareth John played Martin. The “real” Martin, Martin Vick, who devised the show, died in December 2016, just before it went on tour. In the universe of Meet Fred, a play is something that continually opens itself up to reveal its own contingency, its contradiction, its capacity to collapse, its own vulnerability. The presence of the puppet as non-​human transitional object in relation to disabilty is a burgeoning field and one around which questions of authenticity, representaiton and connectedness cohere in new ways. As Laura Purcell-​Gates argues, in her teaching practice she encourages students to see the creative possibilites in puppets who are “flawed” in some way. Rather than fix the flaw, she urges them “instead to explore how this particular puppet wants to move, and suggest that a puppet’s perceived flaws often become a defining feature of the puppet’s emerging life and movement” (Purcell-​Gates and Fisher 368).This chimes with the invigorating workshops and debates at the Broken Puppet Symposium in April 2018. Of particular note was the tendancy for the presence of puppets, for a time, to empty disabilty of meaning: for puppets to create a space outside of literal representation and rather to explore new associative worlds, which in turn allow us to return to the literal world with heightened awareness. As Purcell-​ Gates says, such puppets seem to “be truer representations of how we viewed ourselves than had we chosen to use figurative puppets designed to mimic human bodies” (364–​365). The point was reinforced by Petra Kuppers in her keynote: “Puppet work is magic work: it transforms the world into forms of abstraction, and objects take on their own power.” If the presence of disabilty can often feel like an impasse –​being both real and constructed, being both pain and affirmation –​the transitional puppet object has a powerful role to play in traversfing this deadlock. It is not I; or we; or it: it is itself a beautiful third thing that channels meaning beyond the binary of the privileged or the abject. The crucial point is that these questions of form are as much moral as they are aesthetic. They are, in the context of Meet Fred, questions of moral personhood. As Licia Carlson explains, learning disabled people have often been deployed in philosophy as marginal test cases (them) to articulate something about the majority (us), which animalise and de-​humanise subjects, particularly as “they” are automatically conveyed as experiencing a diminished quality of life (544). By employing the tabula rasa of the puppet, ironically, Meet Fred gives face to the myriad ways that learning disabilty is felt and experienced, but also disavowed and marginalised. Fred is the empty centre around which all the problems of personhood and knowing subjectiveness revolve in the play. I have made several provocations in this chapter: that vulnerability is an interruptive value, both socially (because it upsets the myth of the autonomous self) and aesthetically (since it deploys reflexivity); that it invites spectators’ complicity; and that vulnerability reavows structural 312

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support. After a show full of props, I am struck by the irony of Andrew Sofor’s remark, “A prop is something an object becomes rather than something an object is” (quoted in Jackson 80). Thinking through both learning disability and puppetry as a becoming rather than a fixed position, generates new insights. Fred, the prop who comes to life, who spends the show trying to create both a play and an identity, troubles the binary of the human/​non-​human. Such props become a different type of actor, undermining the fixedness of who is and who is not a performer, of who should or should not be seen onstage; and the support required to put him there.

Works cited Baugh, Bruce. “Authenticity Revisited”. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 46, no. 4, 1988, pp. 477–​487. Bérubé, Michael. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Carlson, Licia. “Feminist Approaches to Cognitive Disability”. Philosophy Compass, vol. 11, no. 10, 2016, pp. 541–​553. George, David E. R. “Performance Epistemology”. Performance Research, vol.1, no. 1, 1996, p. 25. Gilson, Erinn. The Ethics ofVulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social life and Practice. London: Routledge,  2013. Hargrave, Matt. Theatres of Learning Disability: Good, Bad or Plain Ugly? London: Palgrave, 2015. Jackson, S. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London: Routledge, 2011. Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette Theatre”, trans. Idris Parry www.southerncrossreview.org/​9/​ kleist.htm. Accessed 12 October 2012. Kuppers, Petra. “Keynote Address” at Broken Puppet 2 Symposium: Puppety and Disability Performance. Bath Spa University, 14–​15 April 2018. McVeigh, T. “Sally Phillips’s Film on Down’s Is ‘Unhelpful’ for Families, Warns Antenatal Specialist”. The Observer, 2 October 2016. www.theguardian.com/​society/​2016/​oct/​01/​downs-​syndrome-​ screening-​jane-​-​fisher-​expert-​criticises-​sally-​phillips-​bbc-​documentary. Orwell, George. Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. London: Secker & Warburg, 1951. Pettitt-​Wade, Ben. “Email Correspondence”. 2 October 2018. —​—​—​. “Interview”. 4 October  2018. Purcell-​Gates, L., and Fisher, E. (2017). “Puppetry as Reinforcement or Rupture of Cultural Perceptions of the Disabled Body”. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 363–​372. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness:  Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2007. Read, Alan. Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1995. Ridout, Nicholas. Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Shildrick, Margrit. Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality. London: Palgrave, 2009.

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PART V

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26 SEX, DEATH, AND THE WELFARE CHECK Rhythms of disability and sexuality in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives Leon J. Hilton

In the years since its publication Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) has become one of the most indelible texts of experimental life writing as mode of existential protest to have been produced from the devastation of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic.The book collects a series of essays that Wojnarowicz composed over almost a decade of work. Close to the Knives chafes against the genre conventions and expectations that have come to define the memoir as a literary form.1 It resists narrative coherence in favor of experimental literary techniques that recall the disjointed, hallucinatory visual style that so characterizes Wojnarowicz’s work as a painter, photographer, and experimental filmmaker that first brought him attention in the early 1980s in the vibrant underground art scene that sprung up in the derelict tenements and storefronts of downtown Manhattan. In formal counterpoint with the collage and cut-​up composition techniques he put to such canny use in his work as a visual artist of uncommonly radiance,Wojnarowicz’s writing is rough-​hewn and raw, jumping rapidly between half-​remembered scenes of “different things that sift back in some kind of tidal motion” (5). Lend a rage-​fueled voice to the slow-​moving emergency that Wojnarowicz witnessed unfold across multiple scales and registers –​from the churning, molecular depths of his own body to the Grand Guignol pageantry through which cultural fantasies about contagion, sex, death, and (auto)immunity play themselves out  –​the explosive energy of Wojnarowicz’s language offers especially rich terrain for disability theory: it is a book that seems lit up from within by a particularly fierce investment in what Ato Quayson calls the “aesthetic nervousness” that the literary representation of disability can spark, the standard protocols of narrative into crisis and “evoking the boundary between the real and the metaphysical or otherworldly” (22). Studded with piercing hidden details that illuminate how HIV/​AIDS has been ambivalently situated in relationship to the complex and historically contingent meaning of “disability” itself, Close to the Knives offers a densely layered, at times dizzying constellation of narrative images  –​flashpoints of memory that are thick with the sensations of a body being overtaken by the churning currents of a historical catastrophe. In one of the earliest reviews of Close to the Knives, the literary critic Dianne Chislholm noted that the book “eroticizes and politicizes the abused and diseased body,” suggesting that Wojnarowicz’s memoir is in fact an autothenography: a chronicle of the writer’s refusal to reconcile himself with the communal fear and grief that surrounds him and the death 317

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that awaits him (83). Upon its publication, one of the book’s sentences quickly became a touchstone for the AIDS activist movement: “When I was told that I’d contracted this virus it didn’t take me long to realize that I’d contracted a diseased society as well” (114). It is all the more notable that the brief, exhilarating chapter that opens Close to the Knives –​ titled “Self-​Portrait in Twenty-​Three Rounds” –​was in fact written in the years before AIDS had expanded into a generational crisis that would claim the lives of so many of Wojnarowicz’s friends, first appearing in print some four years before the author learned of his own infection with HIV. (Wojnarowicz learned he was HIV positive at the same time that he was diagnosed with full-​blown AIDS in the Spring of 1988; see Carr 391). “Self-​Portrait in Twenty-​Three Rounds” first appeared in print in 1984, in the second issue of the experimental fiction magazine Between C & D edited by the downtown writers Catherine Texier and Joel Rose. According to Wojnarowicz’s biographer Cynthia Carr, Between C & D was “actually a fanfold computer printout sealed in a ziplock bag with handmade East Village art on each cover” (252). “Self-​ Portrait” is a fragmentary collage of narrative snapshots drawn from Wojnarowicz’s fractious childhood and adolescent exploits as a hustler eking out a threadbare survival in stagflation-​ ravaged New York. The gut-​punch of “Self-​Portrait” as the opening salvo of Close to the Knives thus offers a time capsule of sorts, granting us access to a pre-​AIDS world that is nonetheless eclipsed retroactively by the health crisis that would claim its author’s life less than two decades later. “Self-​Portrait in Twenty-​Three Rounds” thus functions as a prelude or preamble that introduces the book’s subsequent attunement to the “disintegration” of the body and indeed of society under the sign of AIDS that would become Wojnarowicz’s core image. Indeed, this chapter argues that “Self-​Portrait in Twenty-​Three Rounds” allows us to read Close to the Knives as a text that occupies a common horizon between queer theory and disability studies. While it is by now well-​recognized how profoundly the furious outpouring of activist, artistic, and intellectual energy generated by the AIDS crisis shaped the development of queer theory, the epidemic’s significance to the emergence of the academic field of disability studies has been less widely acknowledged. Following parallel and often contrapuntal theoretical itineraries, queer theory and disability studies have each drawn lessons from the mournful, devasted militancy of the early AIDS years: indeed, as Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow have noted, the theoretical apertures of queer theory and disability studies have most overtly converged around the literature and theory of sexuality produced in the wake of the AIDS emergency (3). In order to position Close to the Knives at a common point of origin for queer theory and disability studies, it is helpful to consider Wojnarowicz’s work within the context of theoretical traditions that have been concerned with understanding the body as it is implicated in history. I draw from these traditions in the discussion that follows by way of brief recourse to writing by Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Cathy J. Cohen. Most of all, this chapter addresses the relationship between historical experience and material embodiment by drawing from the methodological resources of rhythmanalysis, a concept originally developed by the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In a series of essays from the 1980s, Lefebvre outlined a new approach to the sociological analysis of everyday experience under advanced capitalism by attending to its rhythmic dimensions. Lefebvre proposed that what we come to experience as the “everyday” is itself shaped by “a conflict between great indestructible rhythms”:  the “natural” rhythms of the biological body and ecological systems and the “artificial” or mechanical rhythms that emerge to “the processes imposed by the socioeconomic organization of production, consumption, circulation, and habitat” (82). As a method, rhythmanalysis is defined by its capacity to untangle the relationship between the measurable, quantitative regulation of time as it is shaped by the inexorable capitalist production and the unpredictable, fluid, and unregulatable 318

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temporality of the bodies whose living labor becomes the raw material for the generation of profit. Lefebvre’s account of the everyday as produced by the perpetual clashing of contradictory rhythms is strikingly resonant with the relentlessly propulsive, often hallucinatory style that defined Wojnarowicz’s work as a painter, photographer, collage-​maker, performance artist, punk musician, and writer. Lacking formal education or artistic training, he started to make photo-​collages and wild-​colored paintings in the abandoned warehouses that lined the Chelsea Piers and the East River. His earliest completed series of artworks consisted of twenty-​four black-​and-​white photographs of the artist posing in various New York City locations, wearing a cutout mask of the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. The photographs depict isolated, almost mournful figures bearing silent witness to the fissures in the urban fabric that began to appear as the booming prosperity of the postwar decades began to wane. In eroticizing the wayward and derelict forms of selfhood and sociality that are forged along the seams and margins that formed the wake of these transformations, Close to the Knives reveals how the conventions of life writing –​of self-​narration and representation –​come under pressure when faced with the vulnerable and degraded materiality of the body “under the sign of AIDS” (Duttman 6–​7). While “Self-​Portrait” prefigures the rage and terror of the AIDS emergency, it is primarily an “X-​Ray vision” of the alternately lush and violent sexual underworlds that sprang up in the urban wreckage created by the economic crises of the 1970s: it describes in sometimes harrowing detail the sensory onslaught that Wojnarowicz discovered in the zones of cross-​class, cross-​racial queer contact that blossomed along the West Side piers and in the pre-​ gentrified Times Square with the decimation of urban infrastructures during a period when capital was rapidly in retreat from the urban core. Indeed, I  will suggest that the book also provides a visceral snapshot of a moment that represented a crucial historical juncture in both the political regulation of sexuality and the meaning of disability. Insofar as both disability and sexuality are historically contingent categories that obtain their coherence in relation to the social organization of production,Wojnarowicz offers us a glimpse into an acute period of crisis and transition in the structure of capitalism itself that started to take shape around 1970, just as the ideological coherence of the postwar liberal welfare state was beginning to fray. He depicts a world of poverty and criminality, describing explicit public and semi-​public erotic encounters and sudden eruptions of violence, seeking to transform writing into a weapon that might grant access to a place beyond what he will come to call the Preinvented World.Wojnarowicz invokes this term frequently: so often that it nearly becomes a refrain –​a rhythmic structure in itself. The Preinvented World is Wojnarowicz’s name for the crushing, moralizing conformity and prefabricated sentimentality of a postwar consumer society that (by the time Wojnarowicz was coming of age) had begun destroying itself from within. The Preinvented World is A place where by virtue of having been born centuries late one is denied access to earth or space, choice or movement. The bought up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I’ve always felt like an alien. (87–​88) The Preinvented World can be read as dialectical image, in the sense elaborated by Walter Benjamin: a snapshot that constellates and crystallizes the contradictory elements of a precise historical/​economic formation and allows it to snap into view “suddenly, in a flash” (473). Benjamin imagined capitalism itself as inducing us into a sort of dream-​filled sleep, lulled by the deceptive enchantments of the commodity form that increasingly comes to define the material contours of social reality and everyday experience. He proposed that dialectical images 319

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are those images that have the potential to awaken us into historical consciousness. Indeed, for Benjamin, the “realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking” (13). Wojnarowicz, too, found it necessary to push the conventions of life writing beyond realism by conjuring in words and images the sense of being suspended in the state between sleeping and waking. This interstitial mode of consciousness is compared to the geological rhythms of tidal motion: “Like the ocean’s movement where every seventh wave is higher and more furious than the others, small pieces of last night’s sleep return in the eddy and flow of the day’s turning” (27). The 1970s were marked by a series of financial crises set off by the accumulated forces of the staggering costs of the ongoing Vietnam War, the rapid decline in Fordist manufacturing under the pressures of foreign competition, the failure of the Bretton Wood accords and the subsequent push for the deregulation of financial markets, and the 1973 oil embargo. With inflation increasing inexorably while real wages declined, the US economy was seized by the roiling economic uncertainty whose effects were particularly devastating for New York City by the mid-​ 1970s. As the white middle classes abandoned the city for the suburbs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the resources needed to sustain the physical infrastructure of the city, not to mention its social welfare net, were increasingly decimated. The Rimbaud in New York series is just one example of the way the severe economic contractions of this period shaped Wojnarowicz’s literary and artistic development. He came to artistic consciousness in stagflation-​era New York, and his entire body of work is saturated with the scenes of social abandonment and devastation that he witnessed during this period. In a trenchant discussion of Wojnarowicz’s Waterfront Journals (written between 1978 and 1980), Andrew Strombeck observes that these vivid, fragmentary accounts of the author’s erotic escapades among the city’s burgeoning underclass bear witness to the tectonic shifts in the global economy that marked the period of their composition. To read these journals, Strombeck writes, is to experience simultaneously the withdrawal of the welfare state, the impetus toward self-​creation necessitated by post-​Fordist work regimes, and the momentary falling away of Fordist discipline. These short monologues meditate on the possibilities of life in the ruined city, in the cracks and fissures left when capital withdraws its energies. What alternative erotic, social, and aesthetic arrangements and possibilities emerge in the abandoned spaces carved out by the withdrawn energies of capital? At one point in the book, he describes the Preinvented World  –​with its “calendar turnings”  –​as the place where “I sometimes lose my footing” (87). Losing his footing, Wojnarowicz could be said to experience what Lefebvre will describe as an arrhythmia: a sudden jump or syncope that interrupts the mechanized, artificial rhythms of industrial production and postindustrial consumption (55). In Wojnarowicz’s keen attention to the sheer sensory onslaught of the stagflation-​ravaged urban landscape, disability enters narrative figuration in a number of significant ways. Consider a brief, arresting passage from “Self-​Portrait,” in which Wojnarowicz recounts, in the vivid immediacy of the present tense, a memory from his teenage hustling days: in the horn and hardart’s there’s a table full of deaf mutes and they’re the loudest people in the joint one of them seventy years old takes me to a nearby hotel once a month when his disability check comes in and he has me lay down on my belly and he dry humps me harder and harder and his dick is soft and banging against my ass and his arm is mashing my little face up as he goes through his routine of pretending to come and starts hollering the way only a deaf mute can holler like donkeys braying 320

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when snakes come around but somehow in the midst of all that I love him maybe it’s the way he returns to his table of friends in the cafeteria a smile busted across his face and I’m the one with the secret and twenty dollars in my pocket […] (7) This frank, explicit depiction of the author’s monthly erotic transactions with a seventy-​year-​ old habitué of an all-​night Times Square diner calls out for rhythmanalysis. How might the ambiguous forms of social relation narrated in this raw and even troubling encounter –​and the larger historical forces that determines its contours –​be teased out by attending to the bundle of rhythms (natural and artificial, social and somatic) that saturate this scene? I would like to focus on the way these sexual encounters are keyed to the cyclical temporality of the “monthly welfare check.” The inclusion of this seemingly banal detail enables us to read how, in this passage, what might be called the administrative time of the state wraps itself around the rhythms of the body –​and particularly the rhythmic processes that are felt with particular acuity upon and within bodies that are debilitated and indeed disabled by the inexorable forms of extraction and exploitation of capitalism as a mode of production and social reproduction. Rhythm, Lefebvre writes, “appears as regulated time, governed by rational laws, but in contact with what is least rational in the human being: the lived, the carnal, the body” (9). The reference to the monthly disability check that facilitates the economic transaction of this sexual encounter signals the calendric rhythms of the welfare state’s redistributive mechanism –​itself an imitation or cipher for the structured, “artificial” temporality imposed by the system of wage labor itself, with its relentless abstractions and transmutations of work time into value. Rhythmanalysis is a critical method that was developed to concretize such abstractions: to make time appear by exposing and unravelling the processes by which labor becomes time. This passage narrativizes how the time of the body is made to syncopate with the time of the state, the time of capitalist production, and the time of artistic or literary expression –​even as it prefigures his subsequent interest in turning language itself into a “weapon” to combat the deadly hypocrisies of the Preinvented World that would come to fruition in his later AIDS writing. One thing that “disability” names is a form of social categorization that distinguishes between persons who can and cannot sell their labor in exchange for a wage. This passage from “Self-​Portrait in Twenty-​Three Rounds” is emblematic of the way Wojnarowicz depicts the social erotics that gather beyond the margins of the wage labor system. The critical geographer David Harvey has noted that embodiment itself must be understood according to the extent to which capital itself “circulates, as it were, through the body of the laborer as variable capital and thereby turns the laborer into a mere appendage of the circulation of capital itself ” (157). Wojnarowicz and his sexual companion for the monthly hotel-​room trysts share an experience of marginalization from the exigencies of wage labor. The encounter gives a sense of the cyclical rhythms that are at the margins of all of the ways in which the wage structure comes to generate rhythmic effects that are felt within the body and spiral outward. The appearance of the disability welfare check in this excerpt from “Self-​Portrait” offers a striking, concrete detail that helps to anchor the narrative historically, placing it in proximity to the conservative backlash against the expansion of social welfare that emerged in the midst of the economic crises in the mid-​1970s and intensified under the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Indeed, the temporal structure imposed by the disability check that appears in Wojnarowicz’s narrative account is in turn shaped by the complex history of social welfare programs designed for those deemed too physically or mentally impaired to enter the labor market.The first federal program to provide financial assistance to the disabled was created by the 1935 Social Security Act and expanded with the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid programs as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives in the mid-​1960s. President Richard Nixon was 321

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the first to undertake efforts of welfare “reform” with the establishment of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) of 1974, which provided a guaranteed annual income for the poor and disabled.2 It seems likely that the welfare check referenced by Wojnarowicz belongs to the SSI program. In her 1984 book, The Disabled State, an early key text in the emergence of disability studies as a scholarly field, Deborah A. Stone described the pivotal role that the category of disability plays within the postwar liberal welfare state. Published in the midst of escalating Reagan-​era attacks on welfare  –​and, interestingly, in the same year that “Self-​Portrait in Twenty-​Three Rounds” first appeared in print –​Stone’s argument demonstrates how “disability” came to be defined as an administrative category, located at the interstice between the state and the market and increasingly dependent upon the legitimating authority of medical experts (10–​11). With the rise of social welfare programs in the early twentieth century, attaining the designation of disability came to function as a mechanism by which those deemed incapable of working to support themselves gained access to public benefits.Yet as Stone suggests, the question of who qualifies for social aid is inseparable from a more fundamental issue with the principles of redistribution as such:  the conflict “between work and need as the basis of claims on resources” (12–​13). As Stone observes, The very notion of disability is fundamental to the welfare state; it is something like a keystone that allows the other supporting structures of the welfare system and, in some sense, the economy at large to remain in place. At the same time, the notion of disability is highly problematic.The problem, in brief, is that we are asking the concept of disability to perform a function it cannot possibly perform. We ask it to resolve the issue of distributive justice. (12–​13) The conservative attacks on the welfare system that took hold in the late 1970s and 1980s with the ascendency of the New Right took an aggressively antagonistic approach to the question of distributive justice, one that sutured the conservative cultural politics of “family values” of the resurgent Evangelical Right to neoliberal economic policies of deregulation, financialization, and privatization. The Reagan-​era conservative rhetoric against welfare was racially coded, conjuring the vilified figure of the Welfare Queen who took advantage of what was then perceived as overly lax regulations of the welfare system. Cathy Cohen’s seminar essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” (1997) described the extent to which anxieties about social welfare programs have tended to focus on regulating the errant and unruly sexuality imagined to belong to poor African American women. Cohen’s essay called for a transformation in queer politics to pursue a wider coalitional vision, one that would address “the nonnormative and marginal position of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens” alongside the more recognizably identitarian frameworks pursued by LGBT rights movements (438). Reading Wojnarowicz in tandem with Cohen offers vivid insight into the way the racist moralizing through which the regulation of black sexuality was justified is connected –​via the concept of redistributive social welfare made on the basis of need –​to the definition of disability as an administrative category that authorizes exemption from the need to work. Though Wojnarowicz does not give any indication of his companion’s racial identifications, reading Cohen’s essay alongside Wojnarowicz’s account suggests how the appearance of the welfare check could be said to crystallize how intersecting axes of embodiment (race, sexuality, disability) are positioned in relation to what the queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman has described as chrononormativity –​“the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (3). Wojnarowicz’s account 322

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of the social and sexual worlds he inhabits suggests how the coalitional politics world-​making that Cohen’s essay calls for take shape in the shadowy zones beyond the routinized, “artificial” rhythmic structures of conventional waged labor. Yet it seems equally clear that Wojnarowicz does not seek to redeem the sexual encounter that he narrates, or to dignify it by restoring it into a more palatable relational form. From the brutal, almost dehumanizing description of his companion’s “hollering the way only a deaf mute can holler like donkeys braying when snakes come around,” the language turns suddenly tender, as the narrator reveals that “somehow in the midst of all that I love him.” Yet in tracing the origins of this feeling Wojnarowicz calls up criminal intimacies that are formed in spaces where illicit and even “criminal intimacies” are the very lineaments that saturate the everyday: “maybe it’s the way he returns to his table of friends in the cafeteria a smile busted across his face and I’m the one with the secret and twenty dollars in my pocket.” Here a structure of exchange is grafted onto a structure of knowledge (the smile, the secret twenty-​dollar bill), producing hidden and perhaps illicit forms of pleasure. From this perspective, the most subversive aspect of this excerpt may not in fact be the graphic depiction of a commercial sexual encounter but in showing experiences of erotic and other forms of relational pleasure; what the disability activist and theorist Sunaura Taylor has called “the right not to work.” For Taylor, the right not to work is an especially important ideal that disability politics makes available as a point of solidarity and alliance with other terrains of collective struggle, since it emerges alongside “a complex system of historical, cultural, and geographical discrimination that has evolved inside and alongside capitalism and that we now simply regard (and too frequently dismiss) as disability.” Wojnarowicz’s writing grapples with the question of how language might capture the heightened, intensified experiences of bodily sensation that blur conventional distinctions between pain and pleasure; enjoyment and disgust; the individual body and the social collective. “Each painting, film, sculpture or page of writing I make represents to me a particular moment in the history of my body on this planet, in America,” he writes in a later chapter, which further records the historical lineaments of these moments by following the rhythmic itineraries of bodies convulsed by a desire that seems to exceed capture by any individual body (149). Echoing Lefebvre’s proposal that desire “has a rhythm; it is a rhythm” (35, italics added), Wojnarowicz makes brilliant use of the rhythmic properties of language to evoke its bodily counterpart: in the rapid-​fire, sparsely punctuated sentences that run onto multiple pages –​its two sections separated by a single section break –​one hears the industrial staccato of the second-​hand typewriter on which “Self-​Portrait in Twenty-​Three Rounds” was written; the title of the chapter itself evokes the automated battery of a machine-​gun.The writing retains a sense of the material conditions of its production, transmitting to the reader something of the urgent and compulsive bodily gestures that the authorial consciousness needed to generate in order to write it. This aspect of Wojnarowicz’s writing can be read in relation to a number of currents within late twentieth-​century avant-​garde and experimental literature: indebted to various strands of surrealism, pop, and Beat-​influenced aesthetic tendencies (the later, trippier work of William Burroughs is a clear influence, for example). Wojnarowicz also forged a mode of experimental life writing that combined brutal realism and erotic debasement in ways that are resonant with the work of his contemporaries such as Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and the raw, confessional writers who came to be associated with the New Narrative literary scene. Placing Wojnarowicz in this tradition clarifies how Close to the Knives is also indebted to a particular set of gay literary representational conventions that have been concerned with articulating homosexuality as an outlawed sexuality (“Homosexuality is first of all a criminal category,” the radical gay liberationist Guy Hocquenghem wrote in his 1978 book, Homosexual Desire (67)). Indeed, Wojanorwicz’s tenderly rendered passage here draws upon the representational tropes of prostitution that are 323

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familiar from this tradition. It is a passage that might be read as an account of Wojnarowicz’s transforming his own body into a commodity in an underground sexual marketplace.Yet it also is too complex to be read as a scene of sexual exploitation conditioned purely by economic distress.Wojnarowicz and his older client are mutually positioned outside of chrononormativity, and the use of a disability welfare check to pay for sex might also be read as an act of subterfuge against the administrative temporality of the state. Wojnarowicz’s bracing use of present tense suspends us in an indeterminate, perpetual “now” –​an ambiguous temporality that resists being pinned to a singular event, a localizable then and there, and conveys instead a sense of routinized habits tied to the monthly distribution of the welfare check that produces its own “secret” or hidden polyrhthmic and eurythmic counterpoint to the chrononormative organization of social time.“Public sex situations are not Dionysian and uncontrolled,” as Samuel Delany remarks in his vivid account of the underground sexual economies that flourished in the pre-​ gentrified Times Square that Wojnarowicz’s opening chapter describes, “but are rather some of the most highly socialized and conventionalized behavior human beings can take part in” (158). Close to the Knives makes brilliant use of the rhythmic qualities that bind his language to the interiorized erotic thrum of the body to evoke the sense of a self, and a life, that materializes along the most precarious cracks of the Preinvented World. Lefebvre writes that the rhythmanalyst “must arrive at the concrete through experience” (31). The use of the term concrete is particularly interesting, in light of the fact that he also defines rhythm itself as the “concrete modalities of social time” (78). In “Self-​Portrait in Twenty-​Three Rounds,” the scene of the Times Square hotel room contains “concrete” rhythmic convulsions of bodily pleasure and danger as they are shaped everyday ordinary redistributive mechanisms of the welfare state and its grinding bureaucratic temporalities. Roland Barthes suggests that the description of seemingly minor or trivial details in works of literary realism seemed to serve as a way of anchoring the work in “concrete reality” and aligning it with historical objectivity, noting that “in the ideology of our time, obsessive reference to the ‘concrete’…is always brandished like a weapon against meaning, as if, by some statutory exclusion, what is alive cannot signify –​and vice versa” (146). What, we might ask, can be done with the Preinvented World as a dialectical image that emerges from the particular crisis point in capitalism’s development, as the high tide of Fordism and social welfare liberalism began its brutal retreat? Some possible answers to this question might be found in some of the subsequent chapters in Close to the Knives in which the historical catastrophe of AIDS moves to the center of the book’s concerns. It is the Preinvented World, which he also calls the Other World, that Wojnarowicz likens to the lethal force of the HIV virus: “The Other World gets into one’s bloodstream with the invisibility of a lover. It slowly takes the shape of the cells and their growth, internalized until it becomes an extension of the body” (88). Wojnarowicz’s images emerge from a sense of what he calls a “paranoid reality” (37): invoking the eroticized gay male body invaded from without, he presents a perfectly inverted image to the paranoid logic that equated the infectiousness of AIDS with the subjects and communities most vulnerable to its devastations. Yet Wojnarowicz’s work pervasively resists the solidity of a coherent or consistent social “identity” by interrogating the living, breathing, excessive material ground upon which identity stakes its claim to a place in the order of representation –​which is to say, of the body itself as the boundary between the self and the world. His work is among the most powerful examples of the way life writing under the sign of AIDS compelled writers to seek ways beyond the realist opposition between reality and meaning. Learning of his own infection with the HIV virus, Wojnarowicz obsessively scrutinizes the transformations that seize hold of his body and deform his fear into rage. He writes of carrying an anger that “begins with the earliest memories, when sexuality first stirs beneath one’s skin in an organized social structure that would kill 324

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you spiritually or physically every chance it has” (104). By the end of the book, in a passage of extraordinary concision and economy of expression, Wojnarowicz describes the transformation of his own body into a weapon: “realizing I have nothing left to lose in my actions I let my hands become weapons, my teeth become weapons, every bone and muscle and fiber and ounce of blood become weapons, and I feel prepared for the rest of my life” (81). The final chapters of Close the Knives are filled with devastating accounts of Wojnarowicz’s experiences watching his friends die from AIDS –​experiences that inevitably shape his dawning awareness of his own mortality and impending death following his AIDS diagnosis in 1988.The Preinvented World has become a slaughterhouse: “I feel more vulnerable, like I’m standing on a conveyer belt leading into an enormous killing machine” (167). Faced with the brutal proximity of his own mortality, Wojnarowicz never assents to the force of a negativity that would refuse or give up on the social. Instead, in this vision, we glimpse what Felix Guattari described, in a 1988 essay, as Wojnarowicz’s “revolt against death and the deadly passivity with which society deals with this phenomenon [of AIDS]” (quoted in Carr 413). At points his writing seems to contemplate the immanence of his own death with an almost serene detachment, with an understanding of death as rather “I just tend to see it as some final moment where all the energy of my body will disperse” (82). Indeed, if I have been suggesting that the methods of rhythmanalysis allow us to revisit Close to the Knives as emerging from a shared historical horizon for queer theory and disability studies, death would seem to be the ultimate arrhythmia around which these two critical apertures must converge: death represents the final, implacable, and concrete horizon that AIDS life writing is bound to confront as a problem of conceptualization and representation. In a later chapter of Close to the Knives, Wojnarowicz writes of being able to see “the slow motion approach of the unveiling of our order and disorder” (68). This “unveiling,” he imagines, is prompted by a spark that flares outward and expands to produce “an enlargement of a minute vision” (69) around an ungraspable yet palpably felt center: The center is something outside of what we know as visual, more a sensation: a huge fat clockwork of civilizations; the whole onward rush of the world as we know it; all the walking swastikas yap-​yapping cartoon video death language; a malfunctioning cannonball filled with bone an gristle and gearwheels and knives and bullets and animals rotting with skeletal remains and pistons and smokestacks pump-​pumping cinders and lightning and shreds of flesh, spewing language and motions and shit and entrails in its wake. (69) In striking counterpoint to Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, surveying the wreckage piled up by way of the storm of historical “progress,” Wojnarowicz conjures his fearsome vision of history as an industrial grindhouse of bodily disintegration as a “malfunctioning cannonball”: his X-​Ray vision is not oriented around a the messianic promise of redemption, but he writes instead of a “swirling in every direction simultaneously so that it’s neither going forward nor backward, but from side to side” (69). Revisiting Wojnarowicz’s visionary, furious approach to life writing as a revolt against death holds open the possibility –​indeed, the necessity –​of giving voice to those arrhythmic forms of sociality and desire that manage to emerge beyond the chrononormative temporalities of the Preinvented World.

Notes 1 This discussion of Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives builds upon accounts of the complex historical development of various genres of memoir and life writing offered by LeJeune (1982); Gilmore (1994);

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Leon J. Hilton and Zwerdling (2017). The latter suggests that the term “memoir” should be used to indicate works that are distinguished from “more public kinds of autobiographical writing” and linked to a “secular confessional tradition” with its origins in the works of Rousseau and other authors associated with the European Enlightenment (3). 2 On the history of disability welfare benefits in the United States, see Erin Syron (2002) and DiNetto (2000).

Works cited Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1986. Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” In The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Belknap Press/​Harvard University Press, 2003. Carr, Cynthia. Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. Bloomsbury, 2012. Chisholm, Dianne. “Outlaw Documentary:  David Wojnarowicz’s Queer Cinematics, Kinerotics, Revue Canadienne de Littérature Autothanatographics.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/​ Comparee no. 21 (March–​June 1994): 81–​102. Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens:  The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–​465. Delany, Samuel R. Times Square Red,Times Square Blue. New York University Press, 1999. DiNitto, Diana M. Social Welfare: Politics and Public Policy. Allyn and Bacon, 2000. Duttmann, Alexander Garcia. At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking about a Virus, trans. Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-​Curtis. Stanford University Press, 1996. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010. Gilmore, Leigh.“The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism,Autobiography, and Genre.” In Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, pp. 3–​20. University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Harvey, David. The Limits to Capital. Sage Books,1982. Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor. Duke University Press, 1978. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis:  Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. Bloomsbury, 2004. LeJeune, Phillippe. “The Autobiographical Pact.” ’ In French Literary Theory Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, pp. 192–​222. Cambridge University Press, 1982. McRuer, Robert, and Anna Mollow, eds. Sex and Disability. Duke University Press, 2012. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness:  Disability and the Crisis of Representation. Columbia University Press, 2007. Stone, Deborah A. The Disabled State. Temple University Press, 1984. Strombeck, Andrew.“David Wojnarowicz, Gordon Matta-​Clark, and the Fordist Crisis in 1970s New York.” Post 45 (October 2016):  http://​post45.org/​2016/​10/​david-​wojnarowicz-​gordon-​matta-​clark-​and-​ the-​fordist-​crisis-​in-​1970s-​new-​york/​. Syron, Erin. “The Disabled Welfare Program:  The Welfare System and the Disabled.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-​Knowledge vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 93–​103. Taylor, Sunaura. “The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability.” Monthly Review vol. 55, no. 11 (March 2004): http://​monthlyreview.org/​2004/​03/​01/​the-​r ight-​not-​to-​work-​power-​and-​disability/​. Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration.Vintage,  1991. Zwerdling, Alex. The Rise of the Memoir. Oxford University Press, 2017.

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27 DISABILITY NARRATIVE, EMBODIED AESTHETICS AND CROSS-​M EDIA  ARTS Stella Bolaki

Introduction

This chapter expands the conception of disability life writing beyond narrative or linguistic frameworks and shows the potential of literary disability studies to engage with innovative, experimental and mixed or cross-​media genres. These include artists’ books, textile art, comics and digital storytelling that also blur the boundaries of art, activism and autobiography. Following interventions by cultural disability studies critics such as Simi Linton (153) and Tobin Siebers (3), it foregrounds questions of genre, form and aesthetics in order to demonstrate how artworks about disability not only enlarge our vision of human difference but also complicate notions of the aesthetic and can transform how we think about the arts and their function. By studying disability in the context of the humanities and the arts, disability emerges not as a personal tragedy or medical issue but as “a fresh critical” and creative category (Hall 16). It opens up space to explore imaginative processes that model new modes of representation and forms of knowledge about the body; to think about the ethics and politics of witnessing; as well as to experience how disability reconfigures reading practices and our relationship to the aesthetic qualities and materiality of various artworks. While showcasing some contemporary examples that give a sense of the rich variety of genres and art forms that can be encompassed by the field, through the focus on dyslexia, multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia, the chapter also concentrates on disabilities that have been given less attention than physical disability, or which have been largely approached through medical/​health humanities perspectives. Alice Hall explains that “the ‘discomfort’ with which disability studies has taken up questions of cognitive difference is connected to the fact that the social constructionist models of disability fit more easily with physical disabilities in which ‘disabling’ environmental factors and social attitudes can be clearly located outside of the individual with impairments” (107). The works by Alison Stewart, Deborah Humm and Ravi Thornton that I discuss in the following sections productively negotiate tensions between “disability” and “impairment” (as well as interrogating these terms), mind and body, and the medical and the social, all of which represent key debates running through the field’s different “waves”. Despite their distinct histories, disability studies in its current shape can be seen to intersect with the 327

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second wave of critical medical humanities “in the politicisation and the theorisation of the body, and in the politics and ethics of care” (Whitehead and Woods 13). In augmenting traditional approaches to narrative, building on recent work in health/​medical humanities (Woods; Bolaki;Wasson), this chapter forges additional connections across the disciplinary divide between cultural disability studies and critical medical humanities as well. I begin with a discussion of textile artworks that imaginatively convey the artist’s difficulty with textual communication as a result of dyslexia. I then move on to experimental conceptual art that explores “broken signals” associated with the experience of multiple sclerosis. I conclude with a relational and participatory narrative of schizophrenia which starts from poetry and evolves into a cross-​media project consisting of a stage musical performance, a graphic novel and a digital narrative app. All these examples focus on art forms and genres that extend the “intimacy” that literary narrative allows with disabled characters by inviting readers’/​viewers’ active participation through physical handling, multisensory interaction, co-​construction and collaboration (Snyder and Mitchell 6).

Textile art, textual barriers and dyslexia Alison Stewart’s textile art not only redresses the relative lack of attention that has been given to cognitive difference in the field of disability studies compared to physical disability. It also offers a fresh way in which cognitive difference, particularly so-​called specific learning difficulties, can be explored through an innovative medium. Stewart gestures towards the social model of disability by referring to the ways in which her artistic practice that “developed from her struggle with dyslexia” aims at “removing her own communication barriers” (“Artist Statement”). Barriers are not only architectural but can also be sensory, affective and cognitive. Stewart has devised a visual system of communication that doesn’t rely on language but on fabric; she customarily takes the written “word” –​what she perceives as a disabling factor or barrier –​out of her source material, usually books or maps, and replaces it with fabrics and threads, where pattern, colour, texture and imagery give “an alternative understanding to text” (“Artist Statement”). For example, in Fabricback Novel (2010), a textile artist’s book, Stewart made the twenty pages that the book consists of using different techniques: weaving, felting, knitting, crocheting, free machine embroidery or a combination of two crafts (Figure 27.1). These pages are bound together using wooden spares, nuts and bolts, and are either formed in rows or embedded with lines of black threads, wool or string, to signify letters, words and sentences (“Fabricback Novel”). A similar process is followed in another series she produced called Newsfabrics (2010–​ 11) that reflects how she “reads” a newspaper.1 In both Fabricback Novel and Newsfabrics, trailing threads are left attached; extending the metaphor of textile as a vehicle of conveying difficulties with linguistic communication, Stewart draws an analogy between these “loose ends” and “the text falling apart” (“Artist Statement”). Stewart’s textile art has been described as a way of “transcribing information” or “mapping”. Among her artistic influences she lists Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin who use their “ ‘self ’ within their textiles” (“Artist Statement”). However, works like Fabricback Novel and Newsfabrics are not conventional autobiographical narratives about disability in the sense that dyslexia is not merely a subject matter. Artists’ books typically integrate their formal means of realisation with their themes and Stewart’s work is no exception. By moulding books, newspapers and maps according to her reading experience, she not only “elevates stitch to the realms of fine art” (“Artist Statement”) but also contributes to an embodied and multisensory aesthetic that has been described as “disability aesthetics”. “The idea of disability aesthetics”, according 328

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Figure 27.1  Alison Stewart, Fabricback Novel (2010). Image by Egidija Čiricaitė.

to Siebers, “affirms that disability operates both as a critical framework for questioning aesthetic presuppositions in the history of art and as a value in its own right important to future conceptions of what art is” (20). Stewart’s work experiments with innovative techniques of representation that defamiliarise conventional notions of reading. This is not new to disability studies, but less attention has been given to how cognitive difference can make a distinct contribution to this reconceptualisation of reading. Visual impairment “foregrounds and reconfigures the physical and phenomenological aspects of reading processes through the engagement with technologies such as Braille, computer scanners, audiobooks, and through attention to representations of sound, texture, and smell in textual forms” (Hall 91). By removing words and replacing them with fabric, Stewart’s work is bound to confuse and unsettle those readers who are accustomed to seeing letters and words in print. But it also participates in an alternative kind of mapping that her viewers or readers can enjoy discovering for themselves. As she writes, she wants them “to contemplate and unravel their own journey” through familiar reading material such as maps, paperbacks and newspapers (“Artist Statement”). Fabricback Novel and Newsfabrics are multisensory and invite handling and interaction. Artists’ books are all about interaction: Breon Mitchell characterises their reading as “a performance”; the “ideal” reader is someone who “plays” the book, “actualising” the various elements the artist has built into it, as if it were a “musical score” (162). Readers of course don’t need to be aware of the artist’s dyslexia to appreciate Stewart’s work and, in fact, handling this multi-​textured material might simply be about its sensuous elements. Artists’ books have a powerful effect on account of their tactility and one-​to-​one intimate interaction with readers (Bolaki 57). However, having that additional piece of information about the theme of this textile book adds another dimension 329

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to the reading/​handling process, infusing it with ethical and political concerns without taking away from its aesthetic value. For example, it can help readers reflect on the highly contested but seemingly stable category of dyslexia (as Craig Collinson writes, we tend to refer to people as having or not having dyslexia as if it is a “thing” rather than a constructed concept) that may in turn open up a critical re-​evaluation of concepts such as “literacy”,“illiteracy” and “multiple literacies” (“Dyslexics” 64). It may further direct attention to each viewer’s/​reader’s responsibility as they physically engage with the topics explored in these works, including even a recognition of their part in the Othering experienced by people who fail “to meet social and educational norms of literacy” and are thus defined as dyslexics (“Dyslexics” 68). Stewart has not, as far as I am aware, explicitly addressed the ways dyslexia is conventionally understood. Nor has she situated her work (for example in accompanying artist’s statements) in the context of disability studies.Yet, her artistic process of removing “textual barriers” can be viewed in relation to what Collinson calls “Lexism”, a long-​standing “dominant lexic discourse” that surrounds the concept of literacy. As Collinson explains the importance of the distinction he draws, “The traditional definition is that of a psychological and neurological impairment called ‘dyslexia’. Alternatively if dyslexics, as I propose, are defined by Lexism, the primary issue is one of civil rights: and thereby political not ‘scientific’ ” (“Dyslexics” 64–​65). In other words, it is “our cultural preconceptions of literacy” that “create a norm in relation to which dyslexics are judged abnormal” (Collinson, “ ‘Lexism’ ” 153). Writing in the specific context of education and drawing on the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Collinson outlines a series of thought experiments that consider what would need to occur for the term “dyslexic” to cease to exist. He invites us to envision a society that “gradually evolves over many decades to become completely without written texts”, for example “where the storage of language-​based information is purely through audio files” (“Dyslexics” 66). Stewart’s alternative books, newspapers and maps have a place, indeed could build, such a society. In her discussion of Fabricback Novel, she notes that “ironically the root word of textiles is text” (“Artist Statement”). I interpret this, particularly the qualifier ironically, as recognition of the aforementioned lexic discourse, but it can equally be seen as emblematic of the “force of the analogy between writing and weaving” (Ingold 72) that is at the heart of Stewart’s artistic process. In fact, as Tim Ingold helps us chart the history of that analogy, it is more the other way round; text begins as a “meshwork of interwoven threads rather than inscribed traces”. Both words “text” and “textile” derive from the Latin texere, which means “to weave” (Ingold 63). It is the thread of the weaver that becomes the thread of the writer and Stewart’s work can be seen to reverse that “natural” development. In this way she challenges dominant notions of literacy and thus takes us a step closer to the post-​dyslexic future dreamt by Collinson. While Collinson is concerned that it would take great “lengths” for the “genuine inclusion” envisaged through his thought experiments to become a reality (“Dyslexics” 67), art, however committed it may be, does not need to translate into a set of policies. This does not mean that it is less radical; like philosophical thinking, it is a powerful site of experimentation that has the potential to disrupt conventional ways of thinking about not only disability but also imaginative work itself. Stewart’s work opens up space to explore both aesthetic and political questions surrounding disability, literature and art. It not only challenges aesthetic hierarchies within fine art but also draws attention to how literacy can be articulated and understood through the visual and the tactile as opposed to the textual. Her innovative techniques and textile/​artist’s book media enrich conventional notions of disability life narrative by modelling multisensory ways of expressing experiences of cognitive difference for herself and others. 330

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“The thought thug that goes on in one’s mind”: bodily languages of multiple sclerosis Like Stewart who uses textile as a metaphorical and interactive vehicle to convey her difficulties with text, Deborah Humm uses multimedia experiments that cross the boundaries of poetry, drawing, audio, film and sculpture to “heighten” her audience’s awareness of miscommunication between brain and body that is typical of multiple sclerosis (Humm, “About”). Humm, who has been diagnosed with this condition, is particularly interested in representing “demyelination”: the destruction or loss of the myelin sheath in the central nervous system that impairs the transmission of signals in the affected nerves and becomes responsible for a range of disabling symptoms experienced daily by people with MS. Although not autobiographical in a straightforward way, Humm’s immersive and participatory artworks attempt to make her viewers experience the frustration and randomness of lost and broken signals, misinterpretations and errors –​or, as she puts it, “the miasma of thought thug that is in one’s mind” (“Voyage of the Line” 1) –​so as to form a better understanding of an often “invisible” disability such as MS. As in the case of recent poetic work where disability is manifested primarily through its form rather than narrative,2 Humm is committed to an embodied aesthetics. She has experimented with devising a “bodily” or “biorhythm” language through the use of automatic drawing and draws on particular poetic constraints and structures to give shape to complex experiences that represent MS as more than a pathologised medical issue. Her poetry book, The Variance,Vagaries and Extreme Randomness of MS (2015), references MS through phrases such as “black foggy scary voids”, “tendon reduction”, “random symptoms”, “heavy legs…forever fidget”; metaphors such as “Ants crawling under my skin”, “Rose thorns under the skin” or “Internal thought fog”; and exclamations: “Overwhelmed, where has my head gone expert?”, “Overstimulation threats meltdownment”, “Need to get out, get out, escape the BLARE”. However, what is distinctive about this book is not its content but its structure, or rather, as in the case of most artists’ books, the interplay of the two. Vagaries is a digitally printed and cut poetry book written with mathematical constraints: fourteen lines per page, ten syllables per line, and the last phoneme/​sound on each line throughout the ten pages of the book is the same. Due to this construction, the poems/​sonnets are interchangeable while the cut poetic lines give the book almost limitless possibilities. The structure is indebted to Raymond Queneau, the Oulipian who invented the 100,000,000,000 poem format. Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (1961) was inspired by children’s picture books in which each page is cut into horizontal strips that can be turned independently, allowing different pictures to be combined in numerous ways. Humm adapts this format to highlight broken signals and miscommunication associated with her condition. While it may come as a surprise that rigid shapes and poetic forms can provide freedom, poet Laurie Clements Lambeth, who also lives with MS, has embraced “formal containment” (176). She explains that the subject of MS was “too expansive and tentacled, too emotionally unpredictable” so “the cage of a villanelle” (used in one of her poems) seemed a good way of restricting it or giving it some shape (175). In Humm’s case the 100,000,000,000 poem format retains the tension between expansiveness and “patterned language” (Lambeth 175). Lambeth’s poetry expresses neurons misfiring and seizures in “vividly physical subject and form”, for example through the use of long lines disrupted midstream or a slanted gutter down the middle of some of her poems that conveys brokenness (176). Humm’s cut lines have a similar effect but Vagaries, like a musical instrument, can be “played” in lots of ways by readers (Figure 27.2).They are instructed, in the book’s introduction, to use the bookmark provided from top to bottom or bottom to top in order to hold their chosen line: “Then open the page to reveal your own 331

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Figure 27.2  Deborah Humm, The Variance,Vagaries and Extreme Randomness of MS (2015). Image by Egidija Čiricaitė.

creation. You become the poet with these interchangeable formations, the active reader, the participant, the fellow creator.”3 Considering her artistic influences, which include composers like Philip Glass and avant-​ garde filmmakers like Michael Snow who give attention to “duration” in their experiments with sounds and concrete poetry, it is obvious that Humm appreciates works that seek “to provide a situation where people can become more aware of themselves and their own experiences rather than more aware of some version of my experience” (“About”). Humm describes many daily activities that others take for granted as involving frustration:  “Demyelination is my enemy:  the constant rebuilding of new paths around the broken  –​it’s hard to keep up  –​ fatigued, my system is working twice as hard before I  even do anything, I  am frustrated” (“Voyage of the Line” 4). As they embark on their own journey, imitating the movement of neurons, readers handling Vagaries also need to work on rebuilding new paths. Whether they become frustrated and experience a sense of failure in putting their poem together or approach it as a creative exercise is open for debate. What is certain is that in the end each poem will be different –​“like snowflakes no two neurons are exactly alike”, as Humm reminds us (“Voyage of the Line” 3). 332

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In addition to the book’s cut lines, line imagery recurs in the poems’ content: “A line is cut and the world is knotty”; “Zigzag lines full of anticipation”; “Wiggling and squiggling swirly mass of lines”. However, Vagaries also includes drawings from Humm’s “biorhythm series”,4 created by taking a black pen line “for an automatic walk” (“Voyage of the Line” 9). Without looking, thought control or aesthetic choice, Humm has been using her body as a “seismograph” to capture “bodily biorhythms and movements: coughs, sneezes, hiccups, yawns, sniffs and twitches” (“Voyage of the Line” 5). Like Lambeth who describes the villanelle as an “obsessive” (albeit restrictive) form to house one of her MS poems (175), Humm alludes to the “repetitive but creative” nature of her automatic drawings (“Voyage of the Line” 1). Reinterpreting Henri Lefebrve’s Rhythmanalysis (1992), a work concerned with patterns of activity and movement and with the body in space, Humm reminds us about her automatic drawing practice: “In order to grasp and analyse rhythms, it is necessary to get outside them, but not completely: be it through illness or a technique. […] to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it; one must let oneself go, give oneself over, abandon oneself to its duration” (“Voyage of the Line” 3). Being in a position to situate herself simultaneously “inside” and “outside” this rhythm, with her “journey” drawings5 that capture the movement of neurons Humm rethinks the well-​known metaphor of illness and disability as a journey that we find in many personal narratives. Instead, her work shows what disability more broadly can provide artists, as opposed to what artists can do despite disability.To echo Linton, artists with disabilities can display “rhythm and pattern that are exciting” (212). The focus here is not on a disabled artist as an “inspiration” but on the contributions that such novel forms of expression can make to aesthetics and other fields of knowledge. By articulating “the correspondence between an internal synapsis mishap and an external hand twitch” (“Voyage of the Line” 5) Humm’s drawings literally evolve a bodily language waiting to be deciphered. As she affirms, citing artist Robert Motherwell, “Plastic automatism…is actually very little a question of the unconscious. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms” (“Voyage of the Line” 3). To complement Vagaries, Humm has also produced a short film, TERMS (an acronym for The Extreme Randomness of Multiple Sclerosis but also a play on the phrase “coming to TERMS”). Viewers watch the first three pages of Vagaries flash before their eyes, and with this film that draws on the tradition of concrete poetry, and its typewriter sound effects, she is able to express visual disturbances such as optical neuritis and the overstimulation that can be found in her earlier poems.6 In one of her exhibitions, Humm brings all these media together, displaying the book suspended mid-​air, with the film playing in the room, and the cut poetic lines dispersed on the floor.This installation enhances the message of broken signals and as such the MS view of the world, but this time on a bigger scale rather than through the intimate one-​ to-​one encounter with an artist’s book.7 While not strictly a poet, Humm’s Vagaries can be situated in the tradition of a new disability poetics that “defamiliarizes not only language but the body normalized within language” (Davidson 118). Like “the beating hearts, limping gaits, tapping canes and the humming of a respirator” that we encounter in the poems of the collection Beauty Is a Verb (2011), Vagaries demonstrates a “fine attunement to the rhythms of the body” (Hall 157). In inventing a new bodily language, it not only communicates the experience of MS but also what it means to be human –​a question that Humm’s practice reveals the arts can approach in much more imaginative and powerful ways than the field of biomedicine: In the process becoming so indecipherable, so intense, so visually stimulating you can almost hear it: a white noise. Envisioning the sinewy tangle, a kaleidoscopic mess of nerve (mis)communication, the thought thug that goes on in one’s mind so chaotic 333

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you cannot hold onto one line of thought, one strand, you cannot pluck, follow or grasp one line of enquiry, engagement or one moment from the overwhelming sense of overstimulation, a cacophony of journeying lines building into a great crescendo. Thank goodness for Art, for how else would one express this notion. (“Voyage of the Line” 5)

Cross-​media aesthetics and the experience of schizophrenia The powerful contributions of art as an alternative form of expression for experiences that are difficult to capture and share are also attested by the HOAX project. Like Humm’s journeying lines building into a great crescendo, this is a trilogy of artworks, based on a poem with the same title, written in 2004 by poet and Ravi Thornton’s brother, Rob. Rob wrote hundreds of poems that explore his state of mind while he was living with schizophrenia over a decade, until his suicide in 2008. Drawing on these poems,Thornton wrote the scripts for the stage musical HOAX My Lonely Heart (2012–​14) and the graphic novel HOAX Psychosis Blues, produced by Ziggy’s Wish in 2014. These two pieces were later joined by the HOAX Our Right to Hope narrative app, following a partnership with the Psychosis Research Unit (PRU) in 2015,8 and the project toured across the north of England in spring 2017. The shift from My to Our in the respective titles of the musical and the app captures the fact that Rob’s story is also “many people’s story”.9 The app, a “gamebook-​style app”, allows users to participate in the direction of Rob’s life narrative. Participants are invited to interact with the app, experience the stage musical, interact with the app a second time, take home the graphic novel and then interact with the app again. The HOAX Our Right to Hope app extends the musical and graphic novel content both into the past and into the future (to life –​real and imagined –​after Rob’s death) but also constitutes a mental health research study. Housing the PRU’s optional study questions and using digital tools that allow rigorous data capture, it seeks to explore and understand stigma around mental health in order to raise awareness and support people who experience similar difficulties to Rob. Ravi Thornton has described herself as “a cross-​media script writer” (“Writing HOAX”). Her account of how this project evolved to combine different art forms raises important questions about the relationship between disability, representation and audience response while also illuminating the process of adapting one genre into another. The musical was born when she found “the dialogue” of the script “coming out in verse –​a reflection…of the poetry underlying it” which she let happen. A combination of physical theatre and “dark musical”, HOAX My Lonely Heart focuses on Rob’s relationship with the woman he loves, Helen, and its eventual breakdown. It delves into his emotions over a six-​month period preceding his diagnosis with schizophrenia and leading to his first major psychotic episode. As Thornton further explains: It’s written to be hard-​hitting. Stage scripting allows you to deliver a very immediate kind of intensity to the audience, and I wanted to give Benji [Reid, the director] every chance to deliver that physical punch that knocks you off your feet. I wanted this piece to act as a bold and forceful “call to action” to put mental health on the table. However, that level of force can be too much for some people, and it was important to me that this project remain as widely audience-​accessible as possible. Mental health is a very sensitive subject. People need to be able to enter this story at an emotional volume to suit themselves, and to that end I needed another medium –​one that is no less powerful, but whose power can be meted out in a different way. I chose the graphic novel. (“Writing HOAX”) 334

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The choice of these two distinct art forms also captures the particular manifestations of schizophrenia; in Thornton’s words, it conveys the times it was “immediate and so in your face” and other times when it was “impassive and distant”, or else the “internalised” and “externalised” manifestations of this condition (“Interviews”).This description encourages us to reflect on the question of how people “enter” disability narratives. The answer depends on who these people are (the answer may differ, for example, if it is people experiencing similar difficulties to Rob and even then, there may be further differentiation) and what the subject is (is mental health a more sensitive subject than other disabilities because of its stigma?). But genre and medium are also implicated in these highly politicised questions about the aesthetics and ethics of empathy in the context of artworks about disability. In the case of artists’ books, such as in the examples of Humm and Stewart, even if people did not want to “touch” the topics explored by them, the book form requires handling and interaction. Thornton describes the musical as a “forceful ‘call to action’ ” and the graphic novel as “a quieter way of telling that part of the story” so “you have that space and you have that time to take it in at your own pace” (“Interviews”). This description recalls the distinction that Alan Radley makes between stories of illness that exist within the frame of activism and those that engage “the art of witness” by recreating a person’s experience for others to acknowledge and understand (41). However, this distinction between activism and art, which has also “propelled forward” the field of cultural disability studies (Hall 14), doesn’t neatly map onto HOAX’s distinct components. Thornton maximises the opportunities for encountering and responding to her brother’s story by creating this trilogy of artworks that can be experienced as standalone pieces or parts of a whole.The project encourages audiences to be responsible, in Kelly Oliver’s sense of “response-​ able” (7), and therefore engages them as witnesses to Rob’s testimony. The project does seek to improve the situation of people like Rob (PRU’s mental health studies aimed at decreasing both public-​stigma and self-​stigma around mental health serve that purpose). But, as Thornton explains, even though “neither HOAX script was written as a criticism of the mental health efforts that were afforded my brother”, “throughout the narrative there is a sense [because that was Rob’s reality] that something isn’t quite right with the system” (“Writing HOAX”). There is something powerful about the durational aspect of this project as well, even as the audience retains the freedom to choose where/​how to enter Rob’s story. Thornton has suggested that ultimately it is the combination of all parts “that make this story one of a man and his humanity rather than simply a portrayal of his illness” (“Writing HOAX”). I would also add that it is the aesthetic, as well as political and ethical, elements of these parts that make the project so compelling, and that revisiting Rob’s story through the different components keeps the practices of witnessing and response-​ability that underlie it open not only for Thornton (as sister and artist who represents another person’s experience) but also for its varied audiences. The HOAX project combines Rob’s moving and highly evocative poems with non-​verbal elements –​music, physical theatre, the comics genre and digital storytelling –​to capture what cannot be easily put into words or made visible. Their combined effect results in a rich exploration of “the socio-​somatics of disability: how disability feels and what an impairment means socially for the disabled person” (Squier 74), his family and friends. The physical theatre parts of the performance capture emotions of the moment as well as important aspects of the lived experience of schizophrenia. For example, Rob’s behaviour during psychotic moments, when his mood changes and he starts drinking or becomes frustrated with the process of writing, though described through words in Thornton’s script, becomes manifested as an external entity when HOAX is performed. While Rob and Helen are the two protagonists, a third silent character/​actor (referred to as “The Condition” by the directing team) becomes gradually visible on the stage: initially as a shadow haunting the couple and later on manipulating Rob’s 335

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Figure 27.3  HOAX My Lonely Heart. Writer: Ravi Thornton © 2014. Director (theatre): Benji Reid. Director (film): John Grey. Stills credit: John Grey © 2017. Actors: Christopher Tendai playing Rob, Danny Solomon playing The Condition. Producer: Ziggy’s Wish Ltd.

surroundings and his limbs as the illness takes hold. In one of the most visceral scenes, he helps Rob force crumpled paper containing his poetry into his mouth (Figure 27.3). However, that character’s presence in other scenes reveals how Rob’s condition sometimes manifests as having a comforting role, such as when he cradles Rob in his arms. In recent years there has been a growing interest in unconventional and experimental media for representing disability and illness.10 Susan Squier has argued that comic books, “shadowed as they are by the label abnormal” (in that they are perceived as childish or even “developmentally disabled”) can “offer a rich area in which to explore some crucial issues in disability studies” (72). Comics are “universal” (McCloud 31)  and promote imaginative identification, which fits Thornton’s aim of making Rob’s story relevant to others and raising awareness about schizophrenia. Moreover, as a medium that combines “verbal” and “gestural expression” (Squier 74), comics are able to “reveal the social processes that disable” someone while also drawing attention to the ways disability is “embodied”, thus navigating ongoing debates surrounding the “social model” and the distinction between disability and impairment in the field (Squier 77). HOAX Psychosis Blues functions in all of these ways. It brings together Rob’s lyrical poetic voice that articulates his lived experience and a corresponding “kaleidoscope of rich worlds” (Thornton, “Writing HOAX”) executed by the multiple illustrators of this graphic narrative, chosen to match the mood and atmosphere in each separate poem through their individual artistic approaches. While “The Condition” character in the stage musical controls Rob’s limbs, with their expressive lines, attention to posture and facial expression, vivid colours, abstract shapes and psychedelic imagery, the graphic narrative illustrations evoke mental states and feelings that are hard to articulate. For example, they “penetrate” Rob’s mind through images that show us the contents of his head (as in the “Detainment” segment illustrated by Ian Jones) to capture “the fight with my mind against thoughts that aren’t mine” (Thornton, HOAX Psychosis Blues 70). “Roach Psychiatry” by Mark Stafford has a nightmarish quality and uses grotesque 336

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imagery to express Rob’s protest against the dehumanization of institutionalization: “They can never dissect my essence, no matter how hard they try” (Thornton, HOAX Psychosis Blues 16). In turn, “A Desolate Spot” by Karrie Fransman personifies mental distress to reveal how Rob perceives it (Figure 27.4). By emphasising “the ever-​ changing landscape of the schizophrenic mind” (Thornton, “Writing HOAX”), the multiple illustrations also challenge what Catherine Prendergast has called “the stable schizophrenic, easy to incarcerate, or easy to celebrate as the occasion requires” (61). Prendergast calls for attention to those narratives produced by people who mark themselves “as non-​exceptional [ordinary] schizophrenics” (55) and claim the right to own their experiences by speaking publicly on those issues that affect their lives. In this sense, the graphic narrative’s framing sequence, illustrated by Leonardo M.  Giron, is significant. This sequence is the only realistic one and contains everyday snippets of conversations between brother and sister, dipping in and out of Rob’s life on an annual basis over several years, to build up the reader’s empathy with his struggle with schizophrenia. As Andy Oliver suggests, this sequence “is essential in portraying Rob as seen by others –​Rob as the protagonist in the story of his life rather than commentator on it” (HOAX Psychosis Blues). Though comic books are not tactile like most artists’ books, they foster intimacy with their audiences through what Scott McCloud calls “closure”: comic panels offer unconnected moments to their readers, but readers connect these moments by filling in the gaps between panels to “mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (67). McCloud calls this “a silent, secret contract between creator and audience” (69), which in the case of HOAX Psychosis Blues is also ethical given that the narrative engages its readers as witnesses to Rob’s testimony. The fact that “closure” may not always happen effortlessly for readers is more poignant here, as it reflects the difficulties Rob encounters as a result of his distinct perception of the world; such perception is succinctly captured in one of the lines from the narrative app: “I want to see the whole but I can only see the parts” (HOAX Our Right to Hope). McCloud describes closure as “the agent of change, time and motion” (65).This is manifested in the graphic narrative not only through the framing sequence mentioned above, but also through a drawing that forms gradually between segments (as lines are being added) to create the shape of a butterfly. This butterfly image is how Rob appears to his sister after his death in the penultimate chapter of the book that precedes the segment “A Load Lifted” that portrays his suicide. Resisting both the “narrative of overcoming” and the “tragic hero motif ” that we often find in popular representations of disability, HOAX Psychosis Blues thus infuses its readers with a sense of hope –​seen through the closing images of transformation, wings and floating that stay faithful to Rob’s poems –​while not shying away from the reality of his death. Hope is what drives the project’s interactive narrative app too, HOAX Our Right to Hope. On Ziggy’s Wish website, we see a cartoon image of Rob, like the ones used in the storytelling parts of the app, appealing to audiences’ curiosity and “response-​ability”: “From break up to break down, you can see my whole journey –​and even get the chance to save me in the end.” While comics rely on an audience being “a willing and conscious collaborator” (McCloud 65), participation is internal or implicit; in the case of the narrative app, it is externalised as viewers need to navigate it by making specific choices that require touching their iPads or other mobile devices. Though it doesn’t replicate the materiality of artists’ books, this is a tactile and immersive experience, involving more than one sense, especially if we consider the use of music and some of the app’s animated effects facilitated by digital technology. Once unlocked, participants can complete the app’s four parts in their own time and make various directional choices around Rob’s life choices –​take one path offered or go back and take another to see what changes with the plot –​and in the process decide how he relates to his 337

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Figure 27.4  HOAX Psychosis Blues. Page 39, First Edition. Page 35, Second Edition. Author: Ravi Thornton © 2014. Illustrator: Karrie Fransman © 2014. Chapter: A Desolate Spot. Publisher: Ziggy’s Wish Ltd.

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(a)

(b)

Figure 27.5  HOAX Our Right to Hope. Writer: Ravi Thornton © 2017. Co-​writer: Laura Harper. Illustrator: Andrew Chiu. Producer: Ziggy’s Wish Ltd.

“voices” (frequently portrayed through the image of a mouth that sometimes speaks an incomprehensible language), whether he resists them, and how much they control his actions. In some cases choosing one option results in a dead-​end situation where participants are confronted with a lack of agency. For example, Rob (and by extension each user of the app) is faced with the choice “War” or “Peace” when his voices ask him to resist the medication he is offered. If users choose “Peace”, they get a screen with a stop message “There is No Choice Here” (Figure 27.5a), which forces them to go back.When Rob is contemplating suicide and wonders what would have happened if he had chosen differently, users are once again presented with two choices: “Go back to that moment” or “Stay in the present”. The latter means that he doesn’t survive whereas the former puts each user in a position where they are given the opportunity to prevent Rob’s suicide. As this dramatic scene unfolds, Rob is sitting on the edge of a rock up a hill and seems “agitated, erratic and tense”. The text addresses each participant directly through the pronoun “you”. Two options are offered: “You move closer”; “You stay where you are”. In the ensuing dialogue with Rob, a blank box is used where the image of his interlocutor would normally be. This is because each user has to imagine himself or herself talking to Rob in an attempt to save him (Figure 27.5b).11 This interactive storytelling is interspersed with screens containing Rob’s poems, definitions of particular concepts that are being introduced at different times (for example “The Prodigy Trial” in part 3 of the app,“an ongoing research study aiming to reduce social disability associated with various long term mental health conditions”, which is presented as one option available to people like Rob) as well as statements and questions that are part of the mental health study. 339

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Users who volunteer to take part can choose, for example, whether/​how much (on a scale) they agree or disagree with statements such as “people experiencing psychosis are dangerous to others” or “I could imagine making friends with someone who has had psychosis”. These “interruptions” of Rob’s story, alongside all the other choices participants make as they interact with the app (where at different points they “become” Rob, his voices/​his condition as well as the person who tries to prevent his suicide), play an important role. As Angela Woods has argued, “to be open to the dynamics of testimony is to start to recognise one’s own position within the matrix of power relations in which conflicts over the nature and meaning of mental ill-​health, suffering and trauma are articulated” (49).This is true of responses to the HOAX project. As one participant, Sarah Radford, has commented, “It has made me think a lot about people I know who are or have experienced psychosis…and reflect on the way they are treated by people, services and by me!”12 The works by Alison Stewart, Deborah Humm and Ravi Thornton explored in this chapter are only a few contemporary examples that give a sense of the rich variety of mixed/​cross-​ media genres and innovative art forms that can be encompassed by the field of cultural disability studies. Such works that adopt the formats of artists’ books, textile art, comics and digital storytelling, model new modes of representation and knowledge about the disabled body, while concentrating on experiences that have been given less attention than physical disability. Moreover, Stewart’s, Humm’s and Thornton’s respective projects on dyslexia, multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia enrich conventional notions of disability life narrative in various ways. Complicating the boundaries of art, activism and autobiography they draw attention to formal experimentation and fashion distinct embodied aesthetics that demonstrate how disability can transform how we think about art rather than merely about human difference. These are evocative works that privilege the visual, the tactile/​multisensory, the performative and the participatory to capture what cannot be easily put into words. They offer their various audiences intimate and immersive opportunities to actively experience (and re-​experience through their durational and evolving dimensions) how disability reconfigures reading practices, and how interaction with these works and their disability aesthetics in turn illuminates the ethics and politics of witnessing.

Notes 1 Images from this series can be seen at: http://​alisonstewartartist.co.uk/​?page_​id=310. 2 See, for example, the collection Beauty Is a Verb:  The New Poetry of Disability (Bartlett, Black and Northen). 3 One of the hundred thousand billion possible poems that can be created out of this poetic structure can be seen at: www.linkedin.com/​pulse/​what-​do-​you-​think-​deborah-​humm. 4 Drawings can be seen on her website: http://​deborahhumm.co.uk/​wp/​?page_​id=309. 5 The process of these drawings can be seen in the section “Films” on Humm’s website:  http://​ deborahhumm.co.uk/​wp/​?page_​id=474. 6 The film is available to watch from: www.youtube.com/​watch?v=j8iO060UvtM. 7 A clip of the installation can be seen at: http://​deborahhumm.co.uk/​wp/​?p=669. 8 The project was supported by Arts Council England. Psychosis Research Unit is a joint project between the University of Manchester and Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. For more information on the mental health studies undertaken as part of the HOAX project, see Ziggy’s Wish website: http://​ziggyswish.com/​portfolio/​the-​hoax-​project/​. 9 HOAX Our Right to Hope, programme flyer, Ziggy’s Wish, 2017. 10 The “Graphic Medicine” website hosts a number of examples that explore the interaction of comics and healthcare: www.graphicmedicine.org/​. See also Sara Wasson’s project that investigates “flash” illness writing (both word and image) in relation to chronic pain: http://​wp.lancs.ac.uk/​translatingpain/​.

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Embodied aesthetics and cross-media arts 11 More images and dialogue from the narrative app can be found at: http://​ziggyswish.com/​portfolio/​ the-​hoax-​project/​. 12 Ziggy’s Wish, The HOAX Project, “Qualitative feedback”:  http://​ziggyswish.com/​portfolio/​the-​ hoax-​project/​.

Works cited Bartlett, Jennifer, Sheila Black and Michael Northen, eds. Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011. Bolaki, Stella. Illness as Many Narratives:  Arts, Medicine and Culture. Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Collinson, Craig. “Dyslexics in Time Machines and Alternate Realities:  Thought Experiments on the Existence of Dyslexics, ‘Dyslexia’ and ‘Lexism’”. British Journal of Special Education, vol.39, pp.63–​70. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1467-​8578.2012.00538.x. —​—​—​. “‘Lexism’ and the Temporal Problem of Defining ‘Dyslexia’”. Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, ed. David Bolt. London: Routledge, 2014, pp.153–​161. Davidson, Michael. Concerto for the Left Hand:  Disability and the Defamiliar Body. Corporealities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Hall, Alice. Literature and Disability. London: Routledge, 2016. Humm, Deborah. The Variance, Vagaries and Extreme Randomness of MS. 2015. Special Collections and Archives, Templeman Library, University of Kent. —​—​—​. “About”. http://​deborahhumm.co.uk/​wp/​?page_​id=44, accessed 7 April 2018. —​—​—​. “A Voyage of the Line”. Unpublished essay. www.academia.edu/​8878995/​The_​Voyage_​of_​the_​ Line, accessed 7 April 2018. Ingold, Tim. Lines. London: Routledge, 2016. Lambeth, Laurie Clements. “Reshaping the Outline”. Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, ed. Sheila Black Bartlett and Michael Northen. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011, pp.174–​177. Linton, Simi. My Body Politic: A Memoir. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. Mitchell, Breon. “The Secret Life of the Book:  The Livre d’ artiste and the Act of Reading”. Conjunctions: Verbal-​Visual Relations, ed. Laurie Edson. San Diego: San Diego University Press, 1996, pp.161–​167. Oliver, Andy. “HOAX Psychosis Blues—​Ravi Thornton, Bryan Talbot, Hannah Berry, Karrie Fransman and Company Underline the Astonishing Power of the Graphic Memoir”. Broken Frontier. 6 May 2014.  www.brokenfrontier.com/​hoax-​psychosis-​blues-​ravi-​thornton-​bryan-​talbot-​hannah-​berry-​ karrie-​fransman-​and-​company-​underline-​the-​astonishing-​power-​of-​the-​graphic-​memoir/​, accessed 7 April 2018. Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Prendergast, Catherine. “The Unexceptional Schizophrenic: A Post-​postmodern Introduction”. Journal of Literary Disability, vol.2, no.1, 2008, pp.55–​62. Radley, Alan. Works of Illness:  Narratives, Picturing and the Social Response to Serious Disease, Ashby-​de-​la-​ Zouch: InkerMen Press, 2009. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell. “Disability Haunting in American Poetics”. The Journal of Literary Disability, vol.1, no.1, 2007, pp.1–​12. Squier, Susan M. “So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, the Discourse of Developmental Normalcy, and Disability”. Journal of Medical Humanities, vol.29, no.2, 2008, pp.71–​88. Stewart, Alison. Fabricback Novel. Special Collections and Archives, Templeman Library, University of Kent, 2010. —​—​—​. “Artist Statement”. http://​alisonstewartartist.co.uk/​?page_​id=310, accessed 7 April 2018. —​—​—​. “Fabricback Novel”. http://​alisonstewartartist.co.uk/​?page_​id=269, accessed 7 April 2018. Thornton, Ravi. HOAX Psychosis Blues. Illustrations: Hannah Berry, Karrie Fransman, Leonardo M. Giron, Julian Hanshaw, Rozi Hathaway, Rhian Hughes, Rhiana Jade, Ian Jones, Mark Stafford, Bryan Talbot. Ziggy’s Wish,  2017.

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Stella Bolaki —​—​—​. “Interviews: 5 Reasons We’re Excited about Ravi Thornton’s HOAX”. For Books’ Sake. 6 June 2014. http://​forbookssake.net/​2014/​06/​06/​ravi-​thornton-​hoax/​, accessed 7 April 2018. —​—​—​. “Guest Blog:  Writing HOAX My Lonely Heart/​Psychosis Blues”. A  Younger Theatre. www. ayoungertheatre.com/​guest-​blog-​writing-​hoax-​lonely-​heart-​hoax-​psychosis-​blues/​, accessed 7 April 2018. Wasson, Sara.“Before Narrative: Episodic Reading and Representations of Chronic Pain”. Medical Humanities. Published Online First, 5 January 2018: 1–​7. https://​doi.org/​10.1136/​medhum-​2017–​011223. Whitehead, Anne and Angela Woods, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Woods, Angela. “Beyond the Wounded Storyteller:  Rethinking Narrativity, Illness and Embodied Self-​ Experience”. Health, Illness and Disease:  Philosophical Essays, ed. Havi Carel and Rachel Cooper. Durham: Acumen, 2012, pp.113–​128. Ziggy’s Wish. “The HOAX Project”. http://​ziggyswish.com/​portfolio/​the-​hoax-​project/​, accessed 7 April 2018.

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28 A GRAMMAR OF TOUCH Interdependencies of person, place, thing Shannon Walters

In “Literature as Equipment for Living,” rhetorician Kenneth Burke takes a sociological approach to discourse to explore its boundaries. After analyzing proverbs, showing them to be words suited to a purpose, of an “active nature” for “recurrent situations,” Burke asks “Why not extend such analysis of proverbs to encompass the whole field of literature?” (296). Burke takes a rhetorical and sociological approach to this question because he is interested in developing a kind of “folk criticism,” designed to connect social situations and artistic expression. From this perspective, “art forms like ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘satire’ would be treated as equipments for living, that size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes” (304). In other words, literature is equipment for living because it teaches us important things about what we value, the attitudes we form, and how to react to shared situations. In this sense, all literature can be understood as a form of life writing, or “equipment for living” that serves a purpose. Within disability studies, life writing might be understood as especially crucial “equipment for living” because it communicates the inherent value of disabled lives. Life writing by disabled people serves social, political and rhetorical purposes, exploring wide ranges of disability experience, countering dominant narratives about disability and offering forms of resistance. G. Thomas Couser calls auto/​somatography –​a form of life writing –​“one of the primary venues through which disability authorship has spread through North American public culture at the turn of the century” and argues that “its dissemination presents a new opportunity for enhancing disability literacy in the body politic” (3–​4). In this chapter, I explore disability life writing as equipment for living, arguing that specific disabled writers exhibit significant rhetorical strategies powered by intimate, physical interconnection. To recognize and value these strategies, I propose a grammar of disability life writing focused on the sense of touch among interconnected people, places and things because of the critical role of physical interconnection and interdependence plays in disability experience. Exploring three recent examples of academic life writing by United States-​based writers  –​Christina Crosby, Eli Clare and Mel Chen –​I track how each negotiates writing challenges as disability or chronic illness changes their writing experience. Focusing on the physical connection and its representation in writing, I show how these writers shape a grammar of rhetorical touch comprised of people, places and things. Studying the nouns of this grammar draws attention to the highly inventive and challenging project of writing about disability and complicated interdependency. 343

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A grammar is an interdependent system and structure of language, including, among other things, the study of classes of words, in addition to their functions and relations. Disability life writing necessarily involves rhetorics that feature other people, places and things because disability is a fundamentally interdependent experience. Rhetorical touch –​the ways that disabled writers experience touch and describe touch in language –​is one way to register and value this interdependency. As I’ve explored elsewhere, touch is a rhetorical art that invites intimate identification across diverse bodies. Rhetorical touch connects people to people and also to nonhuman, material bodies such as places and things. Since disability is increasingly understood as hinging on the interaction of a range of human, animal and nonhuman bodies, natural and material spaces, as well and traditional and innovative assistive devices, exploring these interactions is critical, particularly to supplement critical gaps in knowledge. Intersections of disability with sex and gender have been relatively well-​explored in the context of embodiment and person-​to-​person relationships (Kaufman, Silverberg and Odette; Shakespeare, Gillespie-​Sells and Davies; McRuer and Mollow). Lesser explored is how places and things, including environments and materials, also affect disability interdependency in the context of gender and sexuality. This critical gap corresponds to what Kim Q. Hall calls one of the main key sites of disability critique within gender studies: the study of “sex; impairment and the ‘realness’ of the body” (89). Rhetorical touch illuminates and propels this attention to the realness of the body at the complex intersection of disability, sex and gender, uncovering ways that disabled people use life writing as equipment for living to explore contested and complicated interdependencies not only with other people, but also with places, environments and materials. A grammar of touch recognizes that interdependency is difficult to communicate. The grammars of touch –​complexities between person, place and thing –​contribute to the ongoing project in disability studies to critique and refashion discourse and representation. As Mairian Corker and Sally French explain, it is important to reclaim disability discourse in order to address theory’s “failure to conceptualize a mutually constitutive relationship between impairment and disability which is both materially and discursively (socially) produced” (6). This challenge is clear in the difficulties that disabled writers often express in their writing about disability. Poet and memoirist Kenny Fries, born with a congenital deformity in his legs, explains the challenge of his writing process, noting that “[s]‌even years ago I began searching for the words with which to speak about my own experience…I took the initial steps of finding the language, unearthing the images, shaping the forms with which I could express an experience I had never read about before” (1–2). He recalls “what I remember most about that summer is wanting to throw all those drafts away, not thinking them poems” (2). Discarded drafts such as these attest to the challenges of disability life writing. Among the disabled writers I explore, each navigates difficult compositional moments differently, calling attention to challenges of discourse and materiality rather than editing them out or smoothing them over. Exploring touch is one way to mediate between discursive and material productions of disability experience, particularly in instances in which disability challenges traditional understanding of how touch functions. The sense of touch is typically understood as a sensory perception resulting from a combination of nerve receptors and nerve endings that relay bodily information concerning pressure, temperature, pain and movement. Touch is also commonly understood as a form of communication, conveying not only sensory perceptions but also complex social, emotional and interpersonal knowledge. Among the five senses, touch is somewhat unique, being the first sense to develop in the womb, it is almost never completely erased by impairment, age or debility. Touch is both a noun and a verb; one can touch or be touched. This grammar of touch indicates the fundamental property of touch as inherently relational 344

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and conditional, bringing bodies together in social-​material enactments of interdependence. Drawing on personal experience, Petra Kuppers asserts that “Disability is a realm I  traverse with a strong sense of the haptic, the touch of concepts and bodies” (225). In short, touch is “equipment for living” in a material, physical sense as well as a social, connective sense. Touch forms the bonds between people and their environments, connecting living and nonliving bodies together.

Person: intimacy and strained metaphor Christina Crosby, who details her life after becoming paralyzed in middle age following a bicycle accident, uses rhetorical touch to express her frustration at the inadequacy of language to represent her feelings and experiences, especially in relation to her partner, Janet. A Body Undone (2016) is Crosby’s attempt to “begin to put into words a body that seemed beyond the reach of language” (3). Describing her grief, pain and process of learning her new body is a challenge. She writes, “I feel an unassuageable loneliness, because I will never be able to adequately describe the pain I suffer, nor can anyone accompany me into the realm of pain” (31). Figurative language such as metaphor and simile is a poor approximation for Crosby, but useful: “ ‘As if ’ is pain’s rhetorical signature, which requires displacement of metaphor to signify –​its properties can be articulated only by way of something else, and the tropes of pain display the awkwardness of catachresis” (31). Drawing attention to the awkwardness of catachresis –​strained metaphor –​Crosby conveys the inadequacy of existing linguistic structures for communicating pain. Before her accident, Crosby enjoyed a relatively normal, predictable relationship to touch. She writes, “My whole lifetime, I  had moved through the world with my body, feeling my way, often with great pleasure and always by touch” (124). After her accident, Crosby calls herself “untouchable,” (127), noting that her lover Janet can touch her but that her “body can’t know how that touch feels” (127). Describing to a physician how their sexual relationship has changed following Crosby’s paralysis, Janet says, “It’s like she’s a stone butch” (127). Crosby untangles the metaphor, explaining, “by calling me ‘stone,’ Janet metaphorically represented my body’s neurological incapacity as a sexual-​subject position,” identifying this as “catachresis –​a strained metaphor –​and bitter irony” because she desperately wants to touch and be touched (127–128).Working through this strained metaphor allows Crosby to explore both the successes and failures of language in communicating her new life. Metaphor helps Janet and, then Crosby, “to illuminate an embodied life that’s opaque to both of us” (128). That fact that this metaphor is strained is not a problem to be solved, but instead a difficult compositional moment to be marked and highlighted. This illumination of the opaque hinges on an analogy between sex and language: “If sex is like language, so is language like sex. Each has a structuring system (grammar, the body) and a seeming infinity of possible statements one can make (sentences, sex acts)” (129). This analogy connects Crosby’s past –​her untroubled, pleasurable relationship to touch –​to her present and future –​a more complicated, unsure relationships to touch. The analogy is not exact, but approximate: “Most importantly for me, sex and language are both alive and enlivening, and link the life I’ve lived already to the living that opens before me” (129). Touch is integral to this link, a remaking which is both physical and discursive. Crosby depends on rhetorical figures such as metaphor and analogy to explore both her new relationship to touch and her evolving relationship to language. Figures invite departures from the norm in ways that keep bodies and language inextricably connected. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian makes explicit connections between the figures and bodies that invite this 345

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potential when he uses the term figura to refer to “any deviation, either in thought or expression, from the ordinary and simple method of speaking, a change analogous to the different positions our bodies assume when we sit down, lie down, or look back…Let the definition of a figure, therefore, be a form of speech artfully varied from common usage” (IX, i, II). The figures, according to Quintilian, are ways for language to depart from the norm. Bodies, in all their potential ways of reconfiguring themselves, are the models for imagining this departure. Crosby exercises this definition of figures in her approach to strained metaphor and analogy. Since paralysis has altered her sense of touch, Crosby necessarily must alter her approach to language. Rather than searching for the “right” metaphor, Crosby uses the “strained” metaphor of stone butch because its inexact approximation best describes her new, evolving approach to touch and sex. She experiences frustration with touch following her accident and while some of the sense of touch is available to her, it is much changed. The strain of her metaphor reflects the strain of her life experience, as she searches for new language. In the spirit of Quintilian’s definition of figura, Crosby’s new embodiment –​her “different position” –​leads her to experiment with language. In her recognition of language and sex as both “alive and enlivening,” Crosby identifies a form of what is understood in linguistics as the animacy of language (129). Linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein, using evidence from a wide range of languages, posits “animacy hierarchies” as a crucial intersection of grammar and meaning. Queer theorist Mel Chen extends the concept of animacy to encompass a “set of notions” including “a quality of agency, awareness, mobility and liveness” (2) beyond what is traditionally understood as “life” or “living matter.” The implications of this grammar are wide-​ranging and have the “capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy” (3). For Crosby, writing about how a change in touch changes person-​ to-​person intimacy with a sexual partner, the animacy of language is embodied in tropes which operate as equipment for living in that they initiate a turn towards difference, transition and acceptance. Crosby and Janet explore the full range of the liveliness of both language and sex by attending to the challenges and difficulties of this turn, with imprecise but necessary language.

Place: where writing starts For Eli Clare, the concept of animacy operates in a more diffuse register, involving liveliness in an environmental context, including living and nonliving matter. In both of his memoirs, Clare, like Crosby, draws attention to the difficulty of writing about disability. In the final pages of Exile and Pride (1999), Clare notes this struggle, explaining that “to write about any aspect of identity, any aspect of the body, means writing about this entire maze” of gender, disability, class, abuse, sexuality and race (123). Clare identifies as white, disabled and genderqueer, often working through these tangled intersections through writing. Amid this difficult writing process, Clare asks, “Where to start?” and suggests an environmental image suffused with a tactile sense of bodies in motion and connection: “possibly with the memory of how my body felt swimming in the river, chinook fingerlings nibbling at my toes” (123). Clare pairs this technique of starting with question with a personal memory of a conversation with his mother, asking her, “Am I feminine?” (124). The question is vague and unanswerable in Clare’s memory: “maybe I meant: ‘What am I, a girl, a boy, something else entirely?’ ” (124). The questions provoked by the concept of animacy raise similar productive uncertainties regarding definitions. According to Chen, using the idea of animacy instead of the concept of life “helps us theorize current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times, particularly with regard to humanity’s partners in definitional crime: animality (and its analogue or limit), nationality, race, security, environment, and sexuality” (3). Clare’s question is 346

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enlivened but not answered by what Chen characterizes as humanity’s definitional partners, particularly in relation to place. Bookending his initial of where to start, he expands his memory of swimming in a final chapter, the culmination of a pattern of landscape-​based writing throughout the memoir. Contrasting the meaning of terms like “feminine” and “masculine,” which, Clare explains, are, “words [that] were empty signifiers, important because I knew I was supposed to have an attachment to femininity,” he elaborates on his strong connection to place: At 13 my most sustainable relations were not of the human world. I  collected stones…and kept them in my pockets, their hard surfaces warming slowly to my body heat. Spent long days at the river learning what I could from the salmon, frogs, and salamanders. Roamed the beaches at high tide and low, starfish, mussels, barnacles clinging to the rocks. Wandered in the hills thick with moss, fern, liverwort, bramble, tree. Only here did I have a sense of body…And now 20 years later, how do I reach beneath the skin to write, not about the stones, but the body that warmed them, the heat itself? (124) Whereas words like “masculine” and “feminine” lack signification for Clare, his environment is abundant with meaning, forming an alternative grammar. A wide variety of living and nonliving matter animate this environment, and facilitate writing more fluidly than empty signifiers. Echoing his earlier question about how to start writing, Clare turns to felt experiences in the environment to “reach beneath the skin to write” about a sense of body (124). Connecting body and memory, Clare enacts what composition theorist Nedra Reynolds calls the “geographies of writing.” Also known as the “where of writing,” this includes “not just the places where writing occurs, but the sense of place and space that readers and writers bring with them to intellectual work of writing, to navigating, arranging, remembering, and composing” (176). In short, place can motivate a sense of urgency in writing, even in difficult compositional moments. A  tactile sense of warmth kindles this exigency for Clare, as he draws upon the warmth between his body and the stones he collects. By asserting “only here did I have a sense of body,” Clare demonstrates how crucial environment is to his difficult writing process and his evolving definition of gender and sexuality. As Reynolds’ distillation of the “where of writing” suggests, Clare’s question of where to start writing is a familiar one for many composers (176). Difficulty with the start of writing is typically understood as writer’s block. Writer’s block assumes, however, that the problem with composing is one to be solved and the obstacle is simply to be overcome. Significantly, Clare does not use his strong connection to the environment to attempt to solve the problem of his writer’s block. Similarly, the “where” of his writing does not answer his questions regarding his gender and sexuality. Rather than posing the difficulty he faces in starting to write as an obstacle to be overcome, or his sexuality as a question to be answered, Clare turns this ambiguity into a source of purpose. The living and nonliving matter in the environment –​stones, salamanders, moss –​animate his writer’s block without solving the problem of it, as Clare returns to the question of how to write his body. In Brilliant Imperfection (2017), Clare continues his work with “the where of writing” to pose difficult questions about the concept of cure from a disability and genderqueer perspective. Situating cure as the pervasive belief that disabled bodies and minds are broken and in need of repair, but also exploring the allure and potential of cure, Clare uses life writing and critical analysis paired with creative codas to deepen and enrich complex contradictions. The codas, dedicated to objects in the natural world such as “stones,” “shells,” “hermit crabs,” and “myrtle,” show Clare using his environment to animate critical questions. In one chapter, he meditates 347

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on a frog pond that used to exist near his house, but disappeared after new construction, and reminisces about a friend “whose body-​mind has been shaped by military pollution,” asking, “how do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of body-​ minds –​plant and animal, organic and inorganic, nonhuman and human –​while not equating disability with injustice” (60)? Resolving this contradiction is not the goal for Clare, who desires to “think about how we might bear witness to body-​mind loss while also loving ourselves just as we are right now” (60). Clare wrestles with this question by inviting complexity and contradiction, without resorting to easy solutions. In Brilliant Imperfection, Clare’s earlier questions regarding femininity and masculinity develop into the desire to transition from “butch dyke to genderqueer living as a white man” (177). Detailing his gender transition, Clare once again invites complexity and contradiction, echoing his earlier approach to cure and the frog pond to pose a difficult question. “How can I reconcile my lifelong struggle to love my disabled self exactly as it is with my use of medical terminology to reshape my gendered and sexed body-​mind” (175)? The only answer for Clare is “I’m searching for a messier story” (175). This messy story means asking questions that do not have an answer. It also necessarily includes attention to the places of writing, as Clare carries with him a sense of purpose regarding the where of writing to locate questions that connect person (himself), place (his environment) and thing (cure).

Thing: grammars of materiality In the last chapter of Animacies (2012), Chen moves from a theoretical discussion of the metaphors surrounding environmental toxicity and toxins to an autobiographical account. Ambivalent, Chen acknowledges that this personal angle feels like “riskier terrain,” since “academics are often trained to avoid writing in anything resembling a confessional mode” (197). Pushing through these mixed feelings, Chen describes experiences associated with a diagnosis of multiple chemical sensitivity and heavy metal poisoning, writing, “I theorize toxicity as it has profoundly impacted my own health, my own queerness, and my own ability to forge bonds,” including “my relationship to intimacy” (197). Like Crosby and Clare, Chen draws attention to the difficulties of writing about disability and its intersections, highlighting this struggle rather than avoiding it. In an effort to navigate this difficulty, Chen explicitly addresses readers: “Let me get specific and narrate what my ‘toxic’ cognitive and bodily state means” and describes a day of “relative well-​being” that involves a walk around the neighborhood (198).This rhetorical strategy emphasizes risk while also involving audience, including them in an experiment, both on foot and in writing. This rhetorical decision blends a geography of writing with a rhetoric attuned to the study of things, as Chen attempts to access a grammar with which to describe their condition. Chen explains that because of their response to toxins they don’t usually go places “on foot,” but a recent move makes them eager to explore and their body temporarily forgets “some of its belabored environmental repertoire, its micronarratives of movement and response…of provocation and injury” (198). As they navigate the neighborhood, these forgotten adjustments become necessary as Chen realizes they should have brought their chemical respirator. Chen describes how they scan fellow pedestrians, attempting to avoid potential wearers of scents and sunscreen. Walking without a facial mask, Chen recalls the tightly orchestrated movements they must perform when walking and talking with a smoker: “sometimes I had no breath stored and had to scoot ahead to a clearer zone while explaining hastily ‘I can’t do the smoke’ ” (199). Reflecting self-​consciously, Chen examines their word choice: “Indeed the grammatical responsibility is clear here: the apologetic emphasis is always on I-​statements because there is more shame and 348

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implicature (the implicit demand for my interlocutor to do something about it) in ‘the smoke makes me sick,’ so I avoid it” (199). Chen is attempting to find a grammar for the experience of walking and talking with a chemical sensitivity, reaching toward language that reckons with complex questions regarding responsibility and interdependency. Like Crosby and Clare, Chen does not feel that there are readily available grammatical constructions from which they can draw to describe their experience. The awkward construction of “I can’t do the smoke” reflects Chen’s complicated negotiation regarding how to interact with able-​bodied people in a public space that is not hospitable to disability. Chen describes this feeling in tactile terms as “the friction of my dependence… against others’ independence” (199), a formulation that shows them struggling with how to assign responsibility in new and complex situations involving interdependency. A grammar of things, attentive to materiality both present and not, structures this experience for Chen. With the high visibility of an object like a mask or a respirator, an awkward statement of “I can’t do the smoke” may not be necessary, but different social negotiation would ensue. Chen meditates on how wearing the chemical-​filter mask affects their interactions with people in daily exchanges, for example, at a craft store, or in public life, particularly as a raced and gendered body. The mask forces a disability “coming out” akin to discourses of gay, lesbian and transgender sexuality, while also, in Chen’s case, interpolating them as a “walking symbol of a contagious disease like SARS,” with the assignation of “SARS!” being directed to them in public space (200). In short, the mask or respirator animates life in public space differently for Chen and sometimes divisively. By meditating on the complex inter-​subjectivities and interdependencies afforded by the chemical respirator and mask –​and lack thereof –​Chen is engaging with equipment for living a disabled life in a complex public space. One way to understand this equipment for living is through the rhetorical study of objects and things. Recent advances in areas of new materialism, object-​oriented ontology and visual studies attempt to decenter human experience, offering a richer, more varied understanding of the role of things in the world (Rickert; Gries; Hesford, Licona and Teston). From a writing and rhetorical perspective, these inquiries have important implications for how writers compose in both public and private spaces. As Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle explain, “understanding things as active agents rather than passive instruments or backdrops for human activity requires different orientations on rhetoric, orientations inclusive of human beings, language, and epistemology, but expansive enough to speculate about things ontologically” (2). When Chen draws attention to the awkward grammar of “I can’t do the smoke,” they are experimenting with this different orientation in a meta-​compositional moment blending rhetoric and ontology. As Crosby’s experience also shows, highlighting awkward metaphor is a rhetorical orientation toward the process of composing in uncertain situations. For Chen, this experimentation also involves working through a richer approach to the categorical dimensions of things in the role of assistive devices as objects of consequence to their being in the world. Composing with ontological uncertainty regarding the assistive objects in their life, Chen is exploring something akin to Martin Heidegger’s definition of “thing,” which draws on the Old High German word Ding as “a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter” (172). Chen’s meta-​compositional life writing negotiates this uncertainty regarding things. As Barnett and Boyle describe, “ontology stresses relational being” and is “an ongoing negotiation of being through relations among what we might, on some occasions, call human and/​ or nonhuman” (8–9). For Chen, relational being is the basis for a shifting approach to ontology. Signaling to their readers that it’s time “to conclude this narration” of a day in the life of their experience, Chen turns to a final set of unanswerable questions. Returning home to lie on the 349

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couch, unable to rise, Chen describes their lover arriving to greet them, to which they can only grunt in reply.Their lover puts her hand on Chen’s arm, but Chen flinches away, unable to look or speak. Chen reflects, “What is this relating?” and writes, “In such a toxic period, anyone or anything that I manage to feel any kind of connection with, whether it’s my cat or a chair or a friend or a plant or a stranger or my partner, I think they are, and remember they are, all the same ontological thing” (202). Regarding their lover, Chen attempts to come to terms with a radically different approach to intimacy: “I am shocked when her body does not reflect that I have snuggled against it earlier, when the snuggling and comforting happened in the arms and back of my couch” (202). A nontraditional sense of touch blurs Chen’s bodily boundaries as well as the boundaries of the nonliving objects, things and materials around them. Chen experiences the body and touch of their lover, but after recovery, knows that this sensation was felt in the arms and back of the couch. This confusion leads Chen to reconsider animacy and intimacy, calling their experience “an intimacy that does not differentiate, is not dependent on a heartbeat” (203). This intimacy is facilitated by a shared sense of touch as Chen asserts, “The couch and I are interabsorbent, interporous, and not only because the couch is made of mammalian skin” (203). Touch between human and nonhuman objects, for Chen, generates “intimacies that are often ephemeral, and they are lively” (203). The people, places and things that populate Chen’s life and life writing about disability challenge existing understandings of what counts as “lively,” suggesting new combinations and contingent associations, while acknowledging the radical uncertainty this occasions.

Writing sex, gender and disability: remarkable grammars In her exploration of sex and disability, Margrit Shildrick draws from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of bodies as assemblages “that include not simply human beings but animal and mechanistic components of all kinds” to theorize a model of sexuality for disabled people in which “embodied desire enacts all sorts of differential couplings, with no single privileged form” (165–166). This radical destabilization is complex and productive, but Shildrick suggests a future in which it becomes somewhat commonplace. “The reliance of many disabled people on assistive or prosthetic devices, for instance, or the support of other human bodies, to facilitate sexual encounters becomes thus unremarkable” (166). Crosby, Clare and Chen, with their embodied connections to other people, places and things, certainly enact a form of this desire based on motley couplings. However, each writer, rather than making their experience unremarkable, instead underscores the complexities and contradictions of their experience, suggesting that attention to this complexity in writing remains important. In this effort, Crosby, Clare and Chen are continuing an ongoing discussion and project in disability studies that focuses on the importance of naming oppression and marking the difficulties of disability experience. In 1992, disability activist Anne Finger asserted, “Sexuality is often the source of our deepest oppression; it is also the source of our deepest pain. It’s easier for us to talk about –​and formulate strategies for changing –​discrimination in employment, education, and housing than to talk about exclusion from sexuality and reproduction” (9). Finger’s identification of the challenge of talking (and writing) about disability and sexuality is crucial because it recognizes the rhetorical and compositional complexity at work in life writing about disability, a complexity that remains nearly thirty years later. When Crosby discusses the strained metaphor in her writing, when Clare draws attention to his writer’s block and when Chen acknowledges the risky terrain of their autobiographical writing, each explicitly marks the challenges of disability life writing when complex issues of gender and sexuality are at stake. This meta-​compositional decision to explicitly acknowledge and record difficulty rather 350

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than ignore or edit it shows disabled life writers willing to work with the risks and rewards of writing about sex and gender. Instead of opting for clarity, coherence or tight logical arguments, these life writers play with the rhetorical dimensions of language to explore and experiment. The grammar of this life writing delights in awkwardness, strain and risk. In this way, life writers such as Crosby, Clare and Chen also contribute to what Hall identifies as the need to examine the “realness of the body” at the intersection of the study of disability and gender. By paying attention to the realness of writing –​the messy parts of composition, the inexactness of language and the challenges of communicating –​disabled life writers attest to the complex interconnections between life and writing. Documenting the realness of writing also advances an important project in queer theory and disability studies focused on a future of possibility. Crip queer theorists Robert McRuer and Abby Wilkerson’s effort to “desire disability” seeks to support “practices that would work to realize a world of multiple (desiring and desirable) corporealities interacting in nonexploitative ways” (14). To desire disability resists the normative impulse to devalue or ignore disability. For McRuer and Wilkerson, this means that “another world can exist in which an incredible variety of bodies and minds are valued and identities are shaped, where crips and queers have effectively (because repeatedly) displaced the able-​bodied/​disabled binary” (14). The practice of writing the realness and messiness of disability experience, particularly in contexts of interdependency, is crucial to this crip queer future, which does not depend on any singular understanding of what counts as a “real” body or “real” writing.The people, places and things that animate the life writing of Crosby, Clare and Chen demonstrate a version of this world, with a variety of bodies and corporealities interacting in generative ways. Rhetorical touch is one way of recognizing and valuing this interactive corporeality; its grammar is something to be remarked upon. By marking and remarking the difficulties and possibilities of disability experience, disabled life writers demonstrate how the diverse realness of the body is reflected in the realness of writing, a mutually constitutive relationship that necessarily includes the widest possible world of people, places and things.

Works cited Barnett, Scot and Casey Boyle, eds. Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things. Tuscaloosa:  The University of Alabama Press, 2016. Burke, Kenneth. “Literature as Equipment for Living.” The Philosophy of Literary Form. Third Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Clare, Eli. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999. —​—​—​. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Corker, Mairian and Sally French, eds. Disability Discourse. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999. Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies:  Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 2009. Crosby, Christina. A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. AThousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Finger, Anne. “Forbidden Fruit.” New Internationalist no.233, 1992, pp.8–​10. Fries, Kenny. “Introduction.” Staring Back The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, ed. Kenny Fries. New York: Plume Books, 1997, pp.1–​10. Gries, Laurie. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. Utah State University Press, 2015. Hall, Kim Q. “Gender.” Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss and David Serlin. New York: New York University Press, pp.89–​91. Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

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Shannon Walters Hesford, Wendy S., Adela C. Licona and Christa Teston. Precarious Rhetorics. Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 2018. Kaufman, Miriam, Cory Silverberg and Fran Odette. The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability: For All of Us Who Live with Disabilities, Chronic Pain, and Illness. San Francisco: Cleis, 2003. Kuppers, Petra. “Toward a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol.3, no.3, 2009, pp.221–​240. McRuer, Robert and Abby Wilkerson. “Introduction.” Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies. Special Issue of GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, vol.9, no.1–​2, 2003, pp.1–​24. McRuer, Robert and Anna Mollow. Sex and Disability. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory, trans. John Selby Watson. London: George Bell & Sons, 1892. Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Rickert,Thomas. Ambient Rhetorics: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pitssburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Shakespeare, Tom, Kath Gillespie-​Sells and Dominic Davis. The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires. New York: Cassell, 1996. Shildrick, Margrit. “Sex.” Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss and David Serlin. New York: New York University Press, pp.164–​166. Silverstein, Michael. “Hierarchy of Features and Ergativity.” Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages, ed. R. M. Dixon. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1976, pp.112–​171. Walters, Shannon. Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014.

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29 PSYCHOGRAPHICS Graphic memoirs and psychiatric disability Elizabeth J. Donaldson

Introduction: disability studies meets graphic medicine The rapidly growing genre of autobiographical comics and graphic memoirs about illness offers a rich and largely untapped source of materials and ideas for disability studies scholars.Works like Cece Bell’s El Deafo (2014), Peter Dunlap-​Shohl’s My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson’s (2015), Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen (2006), John Porcellino’s Hospital Suite (2014), and David Small’s Stitches (2009) are just a few of the recently published, book-​length first-​ person accounts of disability and illness. Other graphic memoirs like David B.’s Epileptic (2005), Joyce Farmer’s Special Exits (2010), Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (2012), and Aneurin Wright’s Things to Do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park (2015) take on the shared family experience of disability, illness, and dying. Emerging out of the general academic field of comics studies, graphic medicine has become a specialized interdisciplinary area focused precisely on these types of texts. The collectively-​authored Graphic Medicine Manifesto (2015) defines the field broadly as “the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare” (1) and as “a movement for change that challenges the dominant methods of scholarship in healthcare, offering a more inclusive perspective of medicine, illness, disability, caregiving, and being cared for” (2). The tenets of graphic medicine, and specifically this challenge to dominant modes of scholarship, provide a welcoming space for critiques of healthcare from a disability studies perspective. Furthermore, with its interdisciplinary ensemble of artists, physicians, nurses, and academics, graphic medicine also offers the potential for coalition-​building and paradigm change among patients, caregivers, and healthcare workers. In parallel with the growth of graphic medicine, there is now an increasing attention to comics and graphic narratives among disability studies scholars and disabled writers and artists. In 2013 Syracuse University’s Diane Wiener and Rachael Zubal-​Ruggieri created the biannual “ ‘Cripping’ the Comic Con” symposium, or Crip Con, a disability-​positive riff on the original Comic Con. José Alaniz recently published his groundbreaking Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (2014), a culmination of years of research focusing on disability in DC and Marvel comics. In 2016 the collection Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives edited by Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen became the first anthology to focus on disability in comics, and Leroy F. Moore’s Krip-​Hop Nation Graphic Novel (2019) was recently published by Poor Press. As graphic memoirs are finding their way into disability 353

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studies, more college classrooms are engaging with graphic memoirs about disability: MLA’s new Approaches to Teaching Bechdel’s Fun Home (2018) –​the blockbuster graphic memoir that has been adapted into a Broadway musical and adopted as required college reading –​includes Cynthia Barounis’s chapter on “Teaching Fun Home as a Disability Memoir.” Building on these new areas of research, this chapter is at the intersection between disability studies and graphic medicine. A brief note about the language used here is necessary first. In its early days disability studies scholarship focused more often on physical disability, and in recent years disability scholars working on mental illness have grappled with the best ways to describe their distinct concerns and their relationship with disability studies at large. Disability studies of mental illness also exist in a simultaneous tension and alliance with the field of mad studies (see Brewer). In Mad at School (2011), Margaret Price follows Cynthia Lewiecki-​Wilson in using the phrase “mental disability” to cast a wide net, making room for a coalition of people with psychiatric and cognitive disabilities (17), and in turn Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined (2018) deploys Price’s work on bodymind to stress the “inextricability of mind and body,” especially in considerations of race and disability (5). With these larger concepts in mind, this chapter focuses more narrowly on “psychiatric disability,” which purposefully makes a more explicit connection to medicine and systems of healthcare. My use of the phrase “psychiatric disability” is meant to highlight a disability experience that is inextricably entwined with the medical practice of psychiatry and its understandings of madness/​ mental illness/​mental health.1 The sections that follow focus specifically on graphic memoirs about mental distress, beginning with what many consider the very first autobiographical comic, Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), which describes Brown’s experience living with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, is a chronic disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, recurring thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions) that the person feels the urge to repeat, which may interfere with daily life, work, and relationships (“Obsessive-​ Compulsive Disorder”). By reading Binky Brown as an OCD disability memoir, I argue that psychiatric disability and the empathetic treatment of mental health issues is foundational to the genre of graphic memoir. Green’s influence and the central role of mental health in graphic memoir is also evident in the contemporary “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” (1973), Art Spiegelman’s comic about his mother’s suicide which was later inserted into his Pulitzer-​ Prize-​winning autobiographical work about Holocaust trauma, Maus (1991). I conclude by juxtaposing this earlier work by Green and Spiegelman with more recent graphic memoirs about psychiatric disability, including Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (2012) and Ian Williams’s The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James (2015).

“A vast chain of suffering”: Binky Brown and the disability origins of the graphic memoir Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), in which Green’s avatar Binky struggles with obsessive thoughts about defiling the Virgin Mary, is widely acknowledged as the first autobiographical comic. Yet it has only fairly recently been read as a psychiatric “graphic pathography” (Green and Myers 574). The psychiatric disability content of Green’s narrative is equally as important and just as revolutionary as Green’s autobiographical innovations. In the afterword of the 2009 reprint of Binky Brown, Green himself resists being cast as the “father of autobiographical comics” by others and instead identifies himself as the father of another tradition: “Ironically, I have to give myself the one accolade I truly deserve: that Binky Brown 354

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Meets the Holy Virgin Mary anticipated the groundswell in literature about obsessive compulsive disorder by almost two decades” (62). Green explicitly places his text in a canon of disability literature. Binky Brown has always been replete with disability content, even before Green’s later medico-​psychiatric reframing of his work. For example, the inside cover of the original 40-​ page comic introduces Green’s story by emphasizing his mental distress and explicitly calling to a community of fellow neurotics to unite: “If all we neurotics were tied together we would entwine the globe many times over in a vast chain of common suffering” (all emphases in quotations are from the original text). Green’s purpose in Binky Brown is in part therapeutic:  “O, my readers, the saga of Binky Brown is not intended solely for your entertainment, but also to purge myself of the compulsive neurosis which I have served since I officially left Catholicism on Halloween, 1958” (inside front cover). Here Green neatly combines the private and the public: his personal cathartic purge is simultaneously a communal performance. His evocation of his audience as fellow sufferers combined with the public testimony of his private experience embodies a disability politics, in which impairment’s social component is foregrounded. Binky’s story begins in childhood when he accidently breaks a statuette of the Virgin Mary while playing inside his house. He later wonders if the accident is caused by stepping on a crack in the sidewalk, reminiscent of the childhood verse, “Step on a crack /​Break your mother’s back.” Binky comforts himself with the knowledge that at least nothing bad has happened to his mother, while simultaneously imagining her body being crunched under the wheels of a car (Figure 29.1).This is the first of a series of superstitious thoughts that will later overwhelm him, and it is significant for the way in which Binky’s mother is both present and

Figure 29.1  Binky Brown, panel from page 2. Description: Binky walks down the sidewalk past a car and says to himself, “At least nuthin’ bad happened to Mom!” Meanwhile, in a thought bubble above his head, he imagines a car running over his mother’s body and a loud “CRUNCH” sound.

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symbolically displaced by the Madonna, as well as the invocation of bodily harm, brokenness, and disability. The comic then depicts other scenes that are similarly linked to his obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors: for example, young Binky is immobilized when he feels compelled to sit on the grass to protect it from the rain (2), and as a “tot” Binky is so scared at night that he habitually strikes his head against his headboard until he sees stars (3). He develops other compulsive behaviors that are hallmark symptoms of OCD including “a special way of going down his front stairs” (22). If Binky makes an error in these choreographed steps he is obligated to repeat them over and over again until he has executed them perfectly. These ritual behaviors are reinforced by the ritual penances he performs as a Catholic, such as saying the rosary. Binky becomes preoccupied with sinning and develops a mantra, “noyatin”  –​a contracted, nonsensical incantation of his desire to avoid sinful thoughts  –​ that he repeats for relief throughout the day (28). All of these relatively minor examples are presented as precursors to the central obsession that will plague Binky later: the fear that he is sexually defiling the Virgin Mary. Binky’s Virgin Mary obsession takes a form that is in keeping with an artist’s visual-​ spatial thinking: “Binky Brown,” Charles Hatfield explains, “visualizes a world of grid-​like precision, in which invisible vectors of sin crisscross the landscape” (132). The sexually-​ preoccupied pubescent Binky imagines that his penis projects vectors and that he must prevent the linear trajectories of these vectors from intersecting with images of the Virgin. Eventually penis rays emit from other phallic objects: his hands, feet, footprints, etc. Binky develops elaborate routines in order to avoid pointing these rays at churches and statues of the Virgin Mary. Even though Binky realizes that the rays are not real, he is nevertheless compelled to abide by their delusional logic: as Green writes, “The funny thing was that the more vehemently he denied the existence of the rays, the more real they became. All rays were equally potent, too. Penis = hands = feet” (32). His thoughts become increasingly pervasive and disrupting: Now even common objects turn into peckers capable of beaming out the hated and feared rays. Binky went through each day from one crisis to the next –​trying to mold the unwieldly living world into a “safe” mechanical scheme by changing the direction slightly of whatever object happened to be casting a ray. Since this was a full-​time occupation, his grades started to slip. (33) After 12 years of living with these oppressive thoughts, Binky finally finds relief by buying multiple miniature Virgin Mary statues, exposing himself, and then smashing them (40). The small statues themselves are a mass, mechanically-​produced repetition, an OCD-​type of iteration. Their ritual destruction breaks the chain of obsessive thinking that has bound Binky. Binky Brown ends with a page that promises “$5,000 worth o’ psychiatric advice for a mere 50¢!” in which Green advises readers to let intrusive thoughts pass through their minds “like so many charms on a bracelet” (inside back cover). The trick, Green reveals, is to be able to move on to the next thought, rather than getting stuck on an obsessive idea. The sequential nature of these thoughts, like charms on a bracelet or beads on a rosary, are also like the panels in a comic and like the vast chain of suffering or the common experiences uniting disabled people. Even though Green won’t be diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) until years later, the comic is nevertheless a disability illness narrative, which visibly documents Green’s mental suffering, his experimentation with different modes of treatment (including psychiatry and self-​ medication), and his self-​identification as neurotic. 356

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The madwoman in the comic: Binky Brown and “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” The fact that Binky’s freedom from obsessive thoughts is engendered by the symbolic destruction of the Virgin Mary is in keeping with the comic’s fraught depiction of women (and with the ethos of sexism, cartoonish pornography, and violence against women in underground comix at large). Binky is admittedly a misogynist whose views of women are a combination of “awe and aversion”: “Let’s face it –​the kid was cut out to be a misogynist –​his household was swarming with females” (7). Soon after coming to the unwelcome realization that he is a product of his parents’ sexual activity, Binky encounters a parallel primal scene of disability and female sexuality. While Binky is exploring his friend Ralph’s house, he opens a door and sees a naked disabled woman: It seems that Ralph had a deformed sister who was mysteriously closetted [sic] in an upstairs room with a private nurse. Inasmuch as the tits and hair sparked his amazement and delight the wild panic and terror of the misshapen girl left an indelible mark on his psyche. (7; Figure 29.2) In a comic replete with fantasy visions of naked women, this scene is a rare glimpse of a woman perceived with the senses, and she appears panicked, terrified, and seemingly not able to communicate using spoken language. Her “misshapen” body recalls Aristotle’s vision of woman as a deformed or mutilated man. As Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson explains, “by defining femaleness as deviant and maleness as essential, Aristotle initiates the discursive practice of marking what is deemed aberrant, while concealing what is privileged behind an assertion of normalcy” (20). Like Bertha Rochester, Ralph’s sister is a family secret, and for Binky Brown she becomes an indelible mark, or stigmata, on his psyche, exposing the central location of disability and female embodiment in his story. Similarly, a disabled woman holds a central and spectral position in Art Spiegelman’s acclaimed graphic work Maus. A contemporary and friend of Green, Spiegelman also has lived experience of mental illness, as his “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History” (1973) reveals. Spiegelman even drew “Prisoner” in Justin Green’s former San Francisco cottage –​the same place where Green created Binky Brown (Breakdowns, “An Afterword” n.p.). In “Prisoner,” which was originally published as an individual, separate work and then later embedded in Maus, Spiegelman describes his mother Anja’s suicide and the guilt and anger he feels after her death. Hillary Chute notes that “Prisoner” breaks “the narrative flow of Maus, interrupting its pagination, style, and tone…registering confrontationally –​and materially –​the presence of the past” (206–​207). And this presence is in part an absence of the mother: “as a mise-​en-​abyme,” as Machteld Harmsen writes, “ ‘Prisoner on the Hell Planet’ shows the absence of Spiegelman’s mother, which is echoed in the bigger story in Maus” (75). Moreover, “Anja’s appearances in Maus,” Victoria Elmwood argues, “strongly suggest that her suicide is Art’s central trauma”: “his memory of her is disabled by the trauma of her suicide” (705; 708). The importance of intergenerational trauma caused by the Holocaust is painfully clear in Spiegelman’s work. Anja’s suicide and her mental health issues linger in the background and are less obvious but still significant. Preceding the trauma of the camps, in 1938 Anja experiences a debilitating depression and spends three months away from her children at a sanitarium in Czechoslovakia (Maus 31–​36). In “Prisoner” Spiegelman’s own time in a psychiatric institution precedes his mother’s death: as Spiegelman emerges from the subway in the comic’s fourth panel, the top caption reads, “I was living with my parents for the most part (as I agreed to do on my release from the state mental 357

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Figure 29.2  Binky Brown, panel from page 7. Binky opens a door and sees a naked woman, clutching at her breast, saying “Yurk Yokka Yokka Ig.” In the background a nurse says, “Close that door, you!”

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hospital several months before)” (Maus 100). Nothing more is revealed about the circumstances of Spiegelman’s own hospitalization, and although we know how Anja dies, we do not know why: she left no note. The diagnosis of “menopausal depression” floats under his mother’s body later on in the comic, closely followed by another possible explanation: “Hitler did it!” Psychiatric disability and traumatic experiences are inseparable components of this part of Spiegelman’s story, tied together in complicated ways involving Art and his mother. “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History” begins with a photograph of Art Spiegelman as a young boy, his mother Anja’s hand resting on his head (Figure 29.3). This gesture symbolizes the psychological hold Anja has on her son: when she asks Art if he loves her, he “turned away, resentful of the way she tightened the umbilical cord,” and he later complains that she has “shorted all my circuits…cut my nerve endings…and crossed my wires.” In Maus, a graphic work populated by illustrations of mice and cats, the sudden realism of the photograph is jarring and makes Anja’s presence/​absence even more startling. Dominick LaCapra describes Anja as a “phantasmic archive” (172): the first volume of Maus ends with Art calling his father Vladek a “murderer” for burning Anja’s notebooks (158–​159). Although her story in her own words does not survive, her depression and death haunt the text. The comic’s subtitle, “A Case History,” together with the empty bottle of pills by the mother’s body, the background involving Art’s mental hospital stay, his complaints of cut nerve endings, and the diagnosis of menopausal depression work to establish a psychiatric medical context, with Art’s role as prisoner/​patient simultaneously evoking the institutional setting of prison, concentration camp, and psychiatric hospital. In these examples, Green’s Binky Brown equates the female body with monstrosity and physical/​intellectual disability while endlessly displacing the mother. Spiegelman’s “Prisoner” locates

Figure 29.3  “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” title panel. Description: a drawn hand holds a photograph of Art Spiegelman as a child with his mother who is wearing a bathing suit, captioned “Trojan Lake, N.Y., 1958.” Next to the photo, the title text reads: “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History.”

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psychiatric disability in the tightened umbilical cord connecting the bodies of both mother and son, and the final cut of that cord. In both graphic texts, women’s bodies help to carry the weight of disability representation for their authors.

Green’s medico-​psychiatric reframing of Binky Brown In the Afterword of the 2009 reprint of Binky Brown, written later after Green has lived with obsessive thoughts for decades, Green engages in a remarkable reframing of his influential work. Green discusses the creation of Binky Brown and its aftermath, which includes both the critical importance of his work to other artists and Green’s ongoing efforts to understand and master his obsessions. In this new historical narrative, Binky Brown’s neurosis turns into Justin Green’s OCD. Binky’s oppressive Catholic worldview transforms into Green’s creative engagement with Jungian psychology/​spirituality and modern medical technologies. In the original Binky Brown, Green includes a laundry list of methods he has tried in order to purge his Madonna obsession (35). On one page, a series of 16 equally-​sized boxes contains illustrations of the “various avenues of experiment which Binky resorted to with a curiosity borne of frustration and despair,” including beer, gambling, speed, crime, masochism, Hesse novels, obsessive love, protest, yoga, zen, pot, mysticism, psychiatry, painting, the blues, and acid (35). Only one “experiment” seems to help, and it isn’t conventional psychiatry. As Binky walks through town during an acid trip, the LSD wears off and he has the insight that will finally free him: the Virgin Mary is nothing but a bogeyman of his own making (36–​37). The comic ends with his ceremonial destruction of a dozen small Virgin Mary figures. Yet 37 years later in the Afterword, Green describes the meta-​version of this process. Insights from his study of Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols (1964), a work filled with iconography, helped him create the comic: In my youthful vision of Jung’s teachings, that bizarre embodiment of my neurosis –​ the rays which emanated from all appendages –​were not a symbol of mental illness; it was just that I had a divining rod that found sexual water in holy places. (56) Jung frees Brown to explore the symbolism of his neurosis outside of Catholicism and also outside of a pathologizing and reductive mental illness framework: On one of the final sessions with a psychologist in the mid-​’60s, I displayed the new purchase [Man and His Symbols]. After slow deliberation, he said,“It won’t help,” I broke down in tears, and for hours afterwards walked in a daze, boarding the wrong train with my contraband –​feeling that after a glimmering of salvation I was once again consigned to a life of superstition and compulsion. I was utterly alone. This vantage point paradoxically gave me the strength and perspective to create my doppelganger dummy. In Jung’s parlance, Binky was my “Shadow,” my hidden self, which had beneficial as well as destructive potential. Without the idea that the beliefs and rituals of my childhood faith had other possibilities beside their official canonical context, there would simply have been no Binky Brown. (57) Jung enables him to recontextualize his symptoms/​experience. While Jung himself is never mentioned in Binky Brown, later in this essay Green explicitly identifies his use of tarot card images on the front and back covers as part of his “homemade Jungian research” (57).

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While this description pits professional mental health care (the Jung-​rejecting psychologist) against Green’s self-​help approach, Green now embraces medical explanations of his neuroses: I must look elsewhere [other than the Catholic Church], most notably in digital MRI scans, for the source of my true suffering. It was not until the late ‘80s that indisputable medical research and brain imaging revealed that obsessive compulsive disorder is an inherited condition contingent on a chemical imbalance in the brain. (61) Green’s attraction to the visual arguments of brain imaging, in which scans are manipulated and interpreted via theories of the brain, is significant and seems a modern analog to his attraction to the highly visual components of Jung’s work on symbols. Although Green accepts medical explanations of OCD, he has no patience for the bureaucracy of the public health care system and he does not find relief in pharmaceutical interventions. For example, in the midst of a six-​ week trial of medication he finds that his “symptoms were slightly diminished, yet so was my joy” (62). Nevertheless he speculates,“had I persevered with the medical route I may have found a greater sense of peace and equanimity…but I  abandoned this route. My angels apparently need devils” (62). While he abandons medication, Green still has a Jungian-​inspired attraction to the possibilities of modern medicine: I chuckle at the memory of my old shrink’s summary dismissal of Man and His Symbols –​“It won’t help.” Jung beams out from his spot on my personal Mt. Rushmore. Still crazy after all these years, unmedicated (except for coffee), happy and grateful just to be alive, I think there is another possibility: brain imaging technology brings us closer to his vision of alchemy, the union of psyche and matter, than ever before. (63) In the end, Green posits that the advances of modern psychiatry will lead us to ancient truths, and he imagines a future in which medicine and his Jungian-​inspired spirituality merge. Jung was, after all, a psychiatrist with his own lived experiences of mental distress.

Conclusion: re/​visions of diagnoses Disability, Jay Dolmage and Dale Jacobs write, “often seems to demand to be defined by a medical professional in films, novels, and comic narratives”: “disability needs to be ‘ablesplained’ by a medical authority –​and these explanations often usurp the voice or perspective of the narrator and overwrite their identity in scientific and pathological terms” (16–​17). As an example of how “the oracular voice of medicine dominates,” Dolmage and Jacobs describe a page from Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (2012), in which she quotes from the DSM (17; Forney 86). The DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is commonly known as the Bible of psychiatry in the US. It describes (and establishes) the diagnostic criteria for mental illnesses. According to Dolmage and Jacobs, Forney’s depiction of her diagnosis “completely disrupts” her previous pattern of storytelling (17). Diagnostic images like these, they argue, “serve as an emblem for the medical model of disability, a model in which disability can only be understood as a natural aberration, in need of therapeutic or surgical intervention, cure, or eradication” (17–​18). However, I  would argue that while the DSM may disrupt Forney’s story, Forney’s story also disrupts the DSM. On the page Dolmage and Jacobs discuss, the DSM list of depressive symptoms are boxed in a left column, while Forney’s commentary takes up the right

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side, establishing a tenuous equivalency. Moreover, the DSM criteria for depression are not simply rendered (lettered) in Forney’s hand, they are also filtered through the secondary text she consults: Depression for Dummies (Forney 86). In this way, Forney pokes fun at the DSM’s authority and illustrates the complex way psychiatric concepts get filtered through multiple textual iterations until the diagnosis finally finds its way to the patient, only to be refigured again in a highly individual way. Part of Forney’s pattern of storytelling in Marbles is the way in which she talks to and talks back to psychiatry during her process of coming to terms with her bipolar disorder diagnosis. In addition to the depictions of her many conversations with her therapist in the text, she also gives her readers a crash course in her experiences with psychiatric medications (182–​183; Figure 29.4). These images are a powerful counterpart to pharmaceutical companies’ direct-​to-​consumer advertisements in which a messy psychiatric impairment is quickly cured by medication. In these advertisements, potential side effects are often presented in a rapid-​fire voiceover, as a footnote somehow separate from the successful cure narrative. Forney complicates this over-​simplified cure narrative in two pages that depict a series of medications she has used. In these pages side effects are often simply effects: the pros and cons (or bonuses and non-​bonuses) of taking a particular drug. Moreover, taking medication is a journey through multiple imperfect treatments, and a continual negotiation in which Forney must determine what works best for her. Forney’s Marbles reveals how messy, collaborative, and mutually negotiated patient encounters with psychiatry can be and is a reminder that the medical model does not completely describe the nuanced dynamics of disabled people’s encounters with the healthcare system.2 Even the practice of medicine has its subversive moments, as physician Ian Williams’s graphic novel The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James (2015) illustrates. A significant text in the field of graphic medicine, The Bad Doctor tells the story of physician Iwan James (who has much in common with Williams himself) and his encounters with his patients, colleagues, and friends. In one scene James meets with a very anxious patient with OCD. In an attempt to allay his patient’s fears, James reveals, “I’m about the same age as you and I had OCD when I was younger” (135). He prefaces this conversation by noting that very few people know about this aspect of his past. As James points out, although doctors must keep patient information confidential, “there is no reciprocal agreement” (135). James’s confession leaves him especially vulnerable to stigma and even to professional repercussions: earlier when James discusses recurring thoughts about shooting himself (thoughts which bring him relief), his colleague exclaims, “this could invalidate our locum insurance!”3 The “bad” doctor is the doctor with a disability, working within the system. Yet he is only “bad” if viewed within a reductive frame: it is his insight into the disability experience that makes him a good, empathic doctor. Yet the bad doctor’s existence also proves that the boundary between disabled and nondisabled is porous and leaky, even for healthcare professionals. Though James only admits to having OCD in the past in this scene (“I had OCD when I was younger”), in the larger story James’s OCD-​style thinking is still a presence. As recent graphic memoirs attest, people with psychiatric disabilities are everywhere, even in the belly of the beast. In Rx, Rachel Lindsay takes a job marketing antipsychotics. Since she has bipolar disorder, this seems to be an untenable position. In the panel introducing chapter three, “Passing,” she depicts herself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, walking into Pfizer (Figure 29.5).This representation of herself as a bad wolf, of passing in a world of neurotypicals, echoes Williams’s sense of being a bad doctor and highlights the double consciousness of being disabled in an ableist world. Today’s graphic memoirs of psychiatric disability are both a legacy of Green’s groundbreaking confessional comics and are an extension of his work. Psychiatric disability is not only foundational to the genre of graphic medicine; works about psychiatric disability 362

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Figure 29.4  Marbles, page 182. Description: Top of page reads, “From my diagnosis in January 1998 until that point in March 2002, I had taken:” followed by three sections illustrating Forney’s experiences with Klonopin, Lithium, and Depakote. The next page, not included here, is a continuation that illustrates Forney’s experiences with Celexa, Neurontin, and Zyprexa.

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Figure 29.5  Rx, n.p. Description: Two sheep carrying briefcases walk into an office building labeled Pfizer. A wolf wearing sheep’s clothing, also carrying a briefcase, follows. At the top of the page, the title “Passing” appears in large letters.

continue to shape and transform the medium and the minds of readers. For students of disability studies these graphic texts challenge stereotypes of mental illness and offer important and unique insights into the experience of people living with psychiatric disabilities.

Notes 1 For very good reasons “psychiatric disability” may be a problematic phrase for many survivors of psychiatric treatment or for scholars of mad studies.While I do not identify as mad or as a psychiatric survivor, I respect and value my friends and colleagues who do. I speak as someone who has lived through periods

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Psychographics of major depression and treatment for that illness; I also have two close family members who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I identify as a scholar of disability studies with lived experience of mental illness. 2 Notably, while there is a robust and well-​known tradition of incarcerated psychiatric patients seeking freedom from coerced care and involuntary hospitalization, in her book Forney describes her struggle to access affordable treatment.Today access to healthcare, rather than freedom from unwanted treatment, is a central concern for many people with psychiatric disabilities in the U.S. 3 Locum insurance pays for a temporary replacement in case of a physician’s absence. Williams discusses the dangers of disclosure in more detail in “OCD and the Graphic Novel.”

Works cited Brewer, Elizabeth. “Coming Out Mad, Coming Out Disabled.” In Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health, edited by Elizabeth J. Donaldson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 11–​30. Chute, Hillary. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus.” Twentieth Century Literature 52.2 (Summer 2006): 199–​230. Czerwiec, MK, Ian Williams, Susan Merrill Squier, Michael J. Green, Kimberly R. Myers, and Scott T. Smith. Graphic Medicine Manifesto. Philadelphia, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015. Dolmage, Jay, and Dale Jacobs. “Mutable Articulations:  Disability Rhetoric and the Comics Medium.” In Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, edited by Chris Foss, Jonathan W. Gray, and Zach Whalen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 14–​28. Elmwood,Victoria A.“‘Happy, Happy Ever After’: The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.” Biography 27.4 (Fall 2004): 691–​720. Forney, Ellen. Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me. New York: Gotham Books, 2012. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies:  Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Green, Justin. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. 1972. Rpt. Introd. by Art Spiegelman. Afterword by Justin Green. San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s Books, 2009. Green, Michael J., and Kimberly R. Myers. “Graphic Medicine: Use of Comics in Medical Education and Patient Care.” BMJ 340 (13 March 2010): 574–​577. Harmsen, Machteld. “The Art of Maus: Self-​Representation and Confession in the Graphic Novel.” Frame 23.1 (May 2010): 70–​87. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi,  2005. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Lindsay, Rachel. Rx: A Graphic Memoir. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2018. “Obsessive-​Compulsive Disorder.” National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. www.nimh.nih.gov/​health/​topics/​obsessive-​compulsive-​disorder-​ocd/​ index.shtml. Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined:  Dis(ability), Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Spiegelman, Art. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young%@&*! New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. —​—​—​. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1991. —​—​—​. “Prisoner on the Hell Planet.” Short Order Comix #1, 1973. Reprinted in Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young%@&*! N.p. Williams, Ian. The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015. —​—​—​. “OCD and the Graphic Novel.” The Independent. 24 June 2014. www.independent.co.uk/​arts-​ entertainment/​books/​features/​ocd-​and-​the-​g raphic-​novel-​9557855.html.

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30 CHALLENGING THE NEUROTYPICAL Autism, contemporary literature, and digital textualities Hannah Tweed

In 2020, as for much of the late twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, autism remains a topic of fascination in literature and popular culture. Many representations of autism have been critiqued as presenting individuals with autism as the unknowable other, reflecting what Stuart Murray describes as the “desires of a society that wishes to be fascinated with a topic that seems […] to elude comprehension” (4). This chapter provides an introduction to literary and cultural depictions of autism since the mid-​twentieth century, when Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner published their initial papers on autism and Asperger’s syndrome. It also acknowledges the history of autism outside of diagnostic terminology, focusing primarily on autistic life writing. Significantly, while comparatively few novels, plays, or poetry collections by openly autistic writers are produced by mainstream publishers, there are long-​ standing traditions of autistic autobiographies, from Temple Grandin’s Emergence:  Labeled Autistic (1986) to the recent publishing success of Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I  Jump (2007; trans. English 2013)  and Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight (2013; trans. English 2017). These texts are far from unmediated; they frequently involve allographical prefaces by medical professionals, certifying the diagnosis and self-​identification of the authors. Examples include Temple Grandin’s Emergence (1986) and Thinking in Pictures (1995); Lucy Blackman’s Lucy’s Story: Autism and Other Adventures (1999); Luke Jackson, Freaks, Geeks, and Asperger’s Syndrome (2002). However, this practice of mediated discourse, both in terms of limited publishing opportunities, and explicitly mediated “autiebiographies”, is shifting in the twenty-​first century due to the rise of digital publication platforms and online media. I use the term “autiebiography” in line with G. Thomas Couser’s use of the term; “first-​ person narratives by people with autism” (5), where the author typically  –​although not always –​reflects on their experiences as a person with autism as a key part of the narrative. Focusing on creative writing and autobiography on the online forum Wrong Planet, “a web community designed for individuals […] with Autism” (alex, “About Wrong Planet”), and print autiebiographies that started as digital texts, I  argue that online forums for autistic people offer publishing spaces that are comparatively free of neurotypical gatekeepers, and produce texts that explicitly react to and counter a range of autistic stereotypes found in earlier literary depictions of autism. 366

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History and contexts In 2008 Stuart Murray published Representing Autism:  Culture, Narrative, Fascination, the first monograph focused on literary and cultural representations of autism. Murray argued that British and American culture (and disability studies more generally) had moved beyond the “medical model” when discussing disability, with a reduced focus on diagnosis, cure, and normalisation (2; see also Snyder and Mitchell 175, and Longmore 34–​41). Disability studies critics suggested that avoiding the medical mode would lead to fewer tales of the “personal tragedy” (2) of disabled individuals and their families. However, popular culture has continued to produce narratives concerning learning disabilities, especially autism, as the unknowable other, reflecting the “desires of a society that wishes to be fascinated with a topic that seems […] to elude comprehension” (4). Many popular cultural depictions of autism are fundamentally limiting in their representations of disability: first by the established trend of neurotypical people or characters speaking for or in place of autistic individuals (a trope frequently exacerbated by representing the autistic character as a child, or a childlike adult), and second by the prioritising of the views of the medical establishment, at the expense of individual characterisation and expression. Other recurring characteristics of autistic individuals in literature and film include: savant abilities; a lack of self-​ reflexive thought; interests in set topics (maths, numbers, and patterns); the inability to communicate with neurotypical characters. While many of these traits could be described as attributes of autism, when, for example, interest in maps becomes shorthand for a character’s savant abilities and disinterest in social interactions, this pattern becomes a potentially damaging stereotype. For example, in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time (2003), the main character Christopher’s eidetic memory, aptitude for maths, and tenacious interest in prime numbers can become a form of metaphorical shorthand for his distance from the neurotypical characters in the text.Yet autiebiographies such as Temple Grandin’s Emergence and Thinking in Pictures and Lucy Blackman’s Lucy’s Story suggest some of the ways in which literary writing also has the capacity to eschew or manipulate the dominant stereotypes of depictions of autism and genre conventions and represent alternative, complex understandings of autism. As part of increased media focus on autism in the twenty-​first century, the diagnostic terminology surrounding autism has become commonplace, sometimes at the expense of reflections of lived experience.While I discuss “autism” throughout this chapter, following the most commonly used term of reference in Wrong Planet, the term encompasses such a broad and varied range of characteristics and experiences that it becomes an arbitrary categorisation. The act of naming, diagnosing, and defining is one of authority. Cultural authorship has appropriated this medical diagnostic terminology and closely associated it with a set of stereotypes which are frequently distant from some individuals’ experiences of the condition. Focusing on changing medical terminology as an example of this dislocation, autism has been varyingly described as a neurological disorder (Holmer Nadesan 78), a lifelong developmental disability (National Autistic Society, “What Is Autism?”), and a triad of social, communicative, and imaginative impairments (Wing and Gould 12, Happé and Vital 30). It entered its current diagnostic usage in Europe and America in the 1940s, following the publication of Leo Kanner’s “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact” (1943) and Hans Asperger’s “Autistic Psychopathy in Childhood” (1944), but remained an obscure term until the 1960s, when Bruno Bettelheim’s influential (and subsequently discredited) “refrigerator mother” theory began to circulate. Bettelheim posited that autism was caused by a mother’s subliminal rejection of their child, which the child sensed, and responded to by rejecting both the mother and people at large (17–​18). This pattern of mother-​blame has endured in literary representations of autism and cognitive difference long 367

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after the theory has been discredited. “Refrigerator mothers” are discussed 213 times on Wrong Planet (2 April 2018); even more than fifty years after these theories were circulated, they retain significant cultural (if not medical) influence. The classification category and diagnostic criteria associated with autism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), one of the most influential English-​language psychiatric diagnostic manuals, dictates rates of diagnosis across much of the English-​speaking world in the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. The widening of the DSM diagnostic criteria for autism in 1980, 1987, 1994, and 2013 was matched by corresponding jumps in diagnosis, which led to greater public discussion of the condition, and increasingly hysterical references to an “epidemic” of autism (Grinker 1–​5, Miller et al. 200–​210). These references to “epidemics”, in turn, have filtered into literary and cultural depictions of autism; the vast majority of explicit literary representations of autism have been published since 2000. In the history of cultural definitions of autism, two potential Ur-​texts –​what Murray refers to as “autism events” (12) –​speak to different generations. Rain Man (1988), Barry Levinson’s seminal cinematic representation of autism, provided a template for depictions of autism in film for subsequent decades and associated a number of now pervasive stereotypes of the condition. Dustin Hoffman’s Oscar-​winning performance as Raymond Babbitt, a childlike (if middle-​ aged) autistic savant, is referenced directly and indirectly in a significant number of the films with autistic characters (e.g. Snow Cake (2006), I Am Sam (2002)), and such allusions demonstrate its significance in moulding public perceptions of autism and disability. First among these stereotypes is the association between autism and savantism. Given that the National Autistic Society lists prevalent savantism as one of the four most common myths about autism (“Myths and Facts about Autism”), this is a connection that is at best misleading, and at worst panders to a cultural desire for disability as spectacle, what Dan Goodley refers to as “a body that sparks cultural fascination but also rejection” (59). Over fifteen years later, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time (2003) received a comparable amount of critical acclaim and attention, winning plaudits for its original portrayal of autism, and the seeming daringness of its choice of an autistic narrator. It has since been adapted for stage (2012) by Simon Stephens, winning seven Olivier Awards and five Tony Awards, and Warner Bros have purchased the rights for a film adaptation. In both these cases increased awareness of autism has the potential to increase public understanding of the experiences of cognitively different individuals. Nevertheless, these two texts become potentially problematic when held up as definitive representations of autistic experience. The Curious Incident, for instance, has been used as a resource on teacher-​training courses and been recommended as a novel that can teach police how to interact with people with learning disabilities (Singh).1 The cultural power of these celebrated fictional portrayals of autism by neurotypical writers and directors stands, however, in stark contrast with the comparably low profile of autobiographical accounts that autistic experience written in the same period, from Temple Grandin’s Emergence (1986) to Luke Jackson’s Freaks, Geeks, and Asperger’s Syndrome (2002) and Naoki Higashida’s autobiographical writing. Similarly, there are very few fictional texts or poetry anthologies advertised as containing material written by autistic authors. The best-​known autistic autobiography is probably Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I  Jump (2007; trans. English 2013). Although it is a first-​person account of Higashida’s life with autism, this autiebiography is mediated, and to a degree validated, by the fact that it is translated into English from Japanese by David Mitchell and K.  A. Yoshida, and Mitchell’s foreword to the text is heavily advertised in the cover. The Reason I Jump is also published by Sceptre, the same literary fiction and non-​fiction imprint of Hodder and Stoughton that David Mitchell’s novels are published under, and the text is published with cover images and styling that distinctly 368

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associated it as part of Mitchell’s oeuvre, in clear contrast to the head-​shot of Higashida used in the Japanese version of the text. As such, while The Reason I Jump has since been translated into thirty-​five languages, with sales in six figures (Mitchell), the fact that the majority of this success and attention came several years after the original publication in Japanese does point to Mitchell and Yoshida as mediating (if also carefully benign) influences to its circulation. This chapter probes how autiebiographies engage with questions of autistic authority in the twenty-​first century, with the increasing dominance of online publication models. I examine the role of co-​writers, guardians, and gatekeepers, with a focus on autonomy and digital interdependency. These representational politics are particularly important in narratives (autobiographical or fictional) depicting individuals who are non-​verbal (unlike Christopher in The Curious Incident, or Raymond in Rain Man). I explore some of the problems associated with defining personhood and selfhood in terms of the ability to write or communicate verbally, and the complexities of representing non-​verbal experience in written forms such as a novel or autobiography. Discussions of non-​verbal communication require close attention and sensitivity to language –​ both to challenge problematic or damaging terms, and a commitment to listening to people’s lived experience of autism (and disability more broadly) in public discourse. Accordingly, I have avoided using the terminology of high/​low functioning –​partially because it is misleading, and partially because it plays into the language of “use” that pervades public discourse on autism.The damaging potential of the language of high or low functioning autism can be illustrated by the media debate surrounding Simon Baron-​Cohen’s 2009 study into a connection between foetal testosterone and autistic traits in neurotypical children. While the study focused on potential causal evidence explaining the gender imbalance in autism diagnosis (which is heavily skewed towards males, with an estimated 4:1 ratio of male to female diagnosis (Mullard)), media reports concentrated on the possibility of prenatal screening for autism, and the potential suppression of savantism and genius, as societally useful attributes (Berlins, Randerson, Bosley). I  suggest that this emphasis and rhetoric is problematic: the approach reduces discussion of individuals with autism to their specific disabilities, and carries a concerning thread of eugenic discourse. The latter is explicitly challenged by philosophers and disability studies critics such as Martha Nussbaum, Michael Bérubé, and Eva Feder Kittay (606–​627). Bérubé, discussing John Rawls’ contractarian theories of social justice, states that: Any performance criterion –​independence, rationality, capacity for mutual cooperation, even capacity for mutual recognition –​will leave some mother’s child behind. It will create a residuum of the abject, a fraction of the human family that is to be left out of the accounting. Faced with that prospect, it is not enough to say that we should presume competence when confronted by cognitive disability: because sooner or later we will have to come to terms with people who truly are incapable of understanding what it means to come to terms. And then will we write them into the social contract, or will we write them off? (100) Within this context of human rights, and specifically the rights of people with learning disabilities, language is still seen by many critics and theorists as shaping experiences and perceptions. As such, attentiveness to the language of personhood is integral to close readings of literary discussion of disability. In line with Bérubé and Nussbaum’s challenges to the term “normal”, and popular discourse on online autistic forums, I have chosen to use the neologism “neurotypical” to refer to individuals without autism or a learning disability (Nussbaum 125–​126). Neurotypical or “NT” is the 369

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preferred term of a significant number of autistic individuals to describe people without autism or a comparable cognitive difference, including Jean Kearns Miller, an autistic author whose work offers a powerful challenge to prevailing stereotypes about autism through her creative autobiographical writing, stemming from an online support forum. As such, it seems appropriate to use language that has evolved from within online and literary autistic communities, alongside the more pervasive medical language of diagnosis.

Case study 1: Women from Another Planet? Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism (2003) is an explicitly multinational and multi-​authored text written by women with autism, and edited by contributing editors Jean Kearns Miller, Ava Ruth Baker, Sola Shelly, Jane Meyerding, and Diane Krumins (the latter of whom also produced the cover art). The text is a series of interwoven autiebiographies, drawn from the members of an online support group for autistic women (beginning as an email list), and forms a bridge between the (relatively) unmediated digital writing on Wrong Planet, and traditionally printed autiebiographies. As with many autiebiographies, Women from Another Planet? features a foreword by a medical professional, Dr Judy Singer. But Singer is a guarantor with a difference; her degree is only mentioned in the final pages of the book, under “About the Contributors”, and even then, her biography states that she self-​identifies as having autism before outlining her academic interests and qualifications (257). In her foreword to the text, Singer introduces herself as an autistic woman, rather than a medical expert, and promises a book that will not “give you a list of pathologies and signs” (xi). Instead, Jean Kearns Miller and the other writers enable the reader to place themselves in the position of each of the authors of the text, as they experience autism and their environment differently. More than expressing difference, Singer’s foreword presents Women from Another Planet? as a self-​conscious and politicised prototype for a new mode of autistic expression: What we are is the first of a new wave of consciousness in a planet coming to awareness of its extraordinary diversity. We are the first wave of a new liberation movement, a very late wave, and a big one, just when you thought the storm of identity politics, with its different minorities jockeying for recognition, was surely over. We are part of the ground swell of what I want to call Neurological Liberation. It is my hope that this book will begin the task of adding a further intersection to the current framework of gender, class, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, age, and disability. I hope it will add neurological difference to the existing set of social variables. (xii) Singer proposes a very different sort of “use” for her text to that proffered in wider discourses on literary representations of autism; one that extends far beyond snippets of helpful information or insight for neurotypical readers, and into the language of manifesto. She proposes an alternative relationship between authors and readers of autiebiography, one where the latter –​ irrespective of their neurological status –​are asked to “bear witness” to the experiences of the former, rather than judge them, and to inhabit their perspective, at least “for a while” (xi). This description of the creation of Women from Another Planet? closely resembles the transcripts –​themselves fragments of fuller conversations spread out across the message boards –​ of Jean Kearns Miller and her co-​writers’ discussions about how best to structure Women from Another Planet?, which form the first third of the book. Kearns Miller and her fellow authors engage in an extended and self-​conscious debate in the first section of the book; their discussions perform a kind of active recreation of autistic autobiography: 370

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The Book List Begins The idea to write a book about AS [Asperger’s Syndrome] women came up on an email list whose members are mainly people on the autistic spectrum. […] This email list of contributing editors became what we called the booklist. Early on, we knew that it was going to be more than a place to discuss how to put the book together. Email is our preferred mode of communication and socialisation, because it is asynchronous, allowing us the freedom to process each other’s ideas at our pace. […]

J ean:  I’m getting so much out of reading your submissions, even –​and maybe especially in some ways –​the dialogue posts, the longish things that respond to another’s post. I’d love to see some of that exchange format in the book because it’s so vibrant –​even our discussion of our fears of being misunderstood. If I had the nerve I’d propose a whole book as letters/​conversations. Success/​Failure As an example of our interactions: a thread (a discussion that starts with a topic and evolves in various directions), is brought here in its entirety, with very minor editing. […]

J ean:  If any of you need a topic to work on, here’s what a potential contributor told me and why I find it compelling. This woman raised the issue of the marketing concept of “AS person makes good!” She is not by her estimation making good. […] I think this poses an open-​ended ethical and philosophical question that bears thinking/​posting about.There are successes.There are failures.There’s also just AS, the good and the bad. Everything in life is both/​and, not either/​or. Gai l :  People shouldn’t be given the impression that we could all be college graduates or that we are all so dysfunctional that we can’t tie our own shoes. […] There are times when I am more functional, and other times when I am less. Just the other day I got into it with the hubby because he sees the times when I can do certain things. He thinks I can do this all the time if I “try hard enough.” […] J ane: The “can’t” versus “won’t” or “won’t try” dilemma! […]

Liane: The issue Jean raised is the very essence of one of my biggest struggles. I’m struck by how often I defend my AS, how often I exclaim (often rather empathically) “I do have AS! You don’t know what I go through at home! Must I prove it to you?” […] I do not want to have anyone think I’ve overcome some horrid issue, for that implies to me that AS is a tragedy! Sally: The thing that so niggles me about this issue with AS is objectivity. I have no diagnosis, though I have a partner who swears that I am, and a sister that does also. So, as has been said before, every time I mention any stuff to NT’s they say, “Oh, but I have something like that sometimes,” and I myself am left wondering if I am just being a neurotic hypochondriac. Jane: Well, I do have a diagnosis from an expert now, but I am not sure how much difference it makes. (3–​7) 371

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Barbara Hillyer writes that composing an autobiography or memoir is “an act of controlling, delimiting, and shaping one’s emotional expression” (35).Yet what is demonstrated in this extract is more than that: it is first an assessment of potential public perceptions of “emotional expression” and evidence of authors modifying their structure and content accordingly. It is also a performative act: making clear the controlled and conditional nature of autobiographical narrative, while providing additional critical (and ironic) commentary on the unedited nature of the example “thread”. This attitude presents a marked contrast to the validating allographical statements of truth and use found in other, traditionally published autobiographies. The extract makes clear that Kearns Miller and her fellow authors have made a choice to foreground the process of constructing a narrative and the ways in which both autobiography and medical diagnosis are subject to this same shifting often unstable, processes. The authors of Women from Another Planet? also explicitly engage with mediation, authorship, and allographical input elsewhere in the text. One contributor, Mary Margaret Britton Yearwood, suggests that it would be useful to neurotypical and autistic readers alike to include glosses on “autobiographical snap shots” (14). This suggestion is preserved in the book, alongside the proposed commentaries, which appear in italics throughout the text. Others debate the pros and cons of an allographical preface or introduction; Jane Meyerding, for example, suggests choosing an “official of some kind […] an officially diagnosed person, perhaps. Or, if necessary, a PhD” (16). Sola Shelly responds that such a contribution “might help, but there is no 100% insurance” that will ensure neurotypical readers (or indeed any reader) will understand the book and points out that “[Gunilla] Gerland’s books had a preface by a respected professional” (16) but were not automatically considered universally accessible.The eventual choice for the writer of the foreword unites these contrasting suggestions: Judy Singer, PhD, is a self-​identifying autistic individual; her academic qualifications are only mentioned at the back of the book, in the biographies of the list of contributors. In Women from Another Planet? Jane Meyerding recounts her childhood issues with hypersensitivity where, although she “wasn’t accused of lying” (as a “transparently honest” child), she was constantly told she was exaggerating her sensory experiences: It was common for people to tell me how I felt about things. (“Oh, you must feel very _​_​_​_​_​about that”), and perhaps that is normal for adults to do with children. In my case, it was confusing because so often my feelings did not agree with those ascribed to me. (99) This description can be read as exemplary of two trends common to autistic autobiography. Firstly, it illustrates the discomfort and even pain Meyerding associates with hypersensitivity, and the further distress caused when neurotypical listeners cannot or do not comprehend the autistic individual’s sensory experience. Secondly, Meyerding’s account demonstrates a pattern of neurotypical rewriting of autistic experience. Autobiography, and particularly digital forms of life writing such as Women from Another Planet?, have the potential to offer a space for formal experimentation, such as co-​authored forms of autobiography.These offer fertile media through which to discuss and perform the construction of narrative itself, and think about the ways in which different neurotypicality, cognitive difference, and autobiography intersect. When autiebiographies are introduced to the reader (neurotypical and otherwise) by a paratext that focuses on the expression of autistic experience and their artistic production, rather than just diagnosis or observation, then there is a greater scope for interpretation and different readings of the text and autism itself. Women from Another Planet? disrupts narrow medical paradigms that often introduce published print autobiographies by people with autism. As such, it is part of an 372

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increasingly influential group of online publishing which sidesteps mediation from neurotypical gatekeepers and becomes a “catalyst in a growing self-​advocacy movement” (340).

Case study 2: Wrong Planet Wrong Planet (www.wrongplanet.net) is a “web community designed for individuals (and parents/​professionals of those) with autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, ADHD, PDDs, and other neurological differences” (alex, “About Wrong Planet”). It features a discussion forum, blogs and reports on autism research, book reviews of recent publications (e.g. Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes (2015)), and a range of articles and “how-​to” guides. This minimalist mission, which foregrounds a “community designed for individuals […] with autism”, makes a clear statement about the intended priority readership –​with “parents/​professionals” set apart in parentheses. “Design” is also key to the process of reading and writing on this site, as in many other online forums centred on autism. For example: the forum is low on intrusive graphics; there are no auto-​play sound or film functions, even in the “Video” section of the site; the colour palette is muted; all text is formatted in a sans serif font. The latter, at least, is entirely standard for online forums more generally; but cumulatively, the paratextual features of Wrong Planet are unobtrusively centred around access –​particularly access for readers who may have sensory differences, or learning disabilities that render serif fonts harder to read (such as dyslexia).2 Meanwhile, the name choice, as with that of Women from Another Planet?, re-​appropriates one of the prevailing stereotypes about autism: that autistic people are separate from the world, alien to and alienated from neurotypical people (Hacking 44–​59). These concepts are explored, typically to the detriment of the autistic character or person, in a range of cultural productions:  from Simon Armitage’s Little Green Man (2001) to Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men (2011), and, most controversially, Autism Speaks’ 2009 infomercial I Am Autism (dir. Alfonso Cuarón), where autism is a foreign entity that “will plot to rob you of your children and your dreams” (I Am Autism; Autistic Self Advocacy Network). In choosing to use and repurpose this stereotype of the autistic individual as an alien invader, both Jean Kearns Miller and her co-​authors, and the creators of and contributors to Wrong Planet, present texts that discuss autism and neurotypical experience, where the latter is either presented as atypical (to the writer and presumed readers), or as a colonising influence. This question of control regarding representation of autism is a recurring theme, particularly in life writing and creative writing by autistic people. This is not only a matter of who controls diagnostic terminology and behavioural expectation, but also publishing environments and language: the right to self-​represent. Prolific autiebiography author Donna Williams describes her insistence on editorial control over her texts as exemplar of how “it is not that I dare to speak about other people who share conditions like mine but how I dare to that is important” (viii, italics added). Wrong Planet is explicit in engaging with its status as an alternative gatekeeping culture. Its rules of conduct are locked at the top of every discussion thread on the forum, and state that “insinuation, ridicule and personal insults, regardless of whether direct or indirect” are banned, and while “attacking an opinion, belief or philosophy is acceptable, […] attacking the person making the comments is not” (alex, “WrongPlanet Rules”). Apart from the statement about creating a safe space for discussions, and reminders regarding copyright laws and offensive language and images, the Wrong Planet rules of conduct involve little interference with posts. The site removes material that is deemed to be slanderous, illegal, or constitutes a personal attack on another person but, beyond this, form, grammar, and content are not edited. Writing about social media, and particularly how life writing blog posts are shaped by their digital platforms, Madeleine Sorapure argues that contemporary autobiography theory “needs to 373

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account for this blended/​cyborg model of authorship, where the interfaces of writing strongly influence self-​representation” (268).The trend towards joint digital authorship in contemporary autiebiographies is clear: from Women from Another Planet? to Naoki Higashida’s Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight (based on blog entries Higashida wrote as a teenager, edited to react to reader responses). The range of autistic publications and online communities currently operating offer new models of reading auto-​and autiebiographies: they strip away paratexts and traditional gatekeepers and editors, offering a space in which writers are highly self-​conscious about processes of mediation and form but can creatively challenge established forms of writing about autism. This self-​conscious approach to form is also evident in the ways in which the writers on Wrong Planet discuss and analyse literature about autism or by autistic people. Since the establishment of Wrong Planet, even as a home enterprise and coding practice in 2001, the site has foregrounded its engagement with literature and culture, from the epigraph “I guess I was just born on the wrong planet!” (an embedded link to Bill Nersshi’s “Born on the Wrong Planet” (1996)), to site subsections dedicated to autobiography (titled “Ramblings”) and “Music” (Wrong Planet, 14 March 2001). Furthermore, from the relaunch of the site as a dedicated forum for people with autism, there was consistent interest in creative writing (fiction and non-​fiction). The only theme-​specific topics to receive dedicated menu entries in 2004, when the site reached 500 members, are “Writing and Poetry” and “Books”  –​both discussion areas centred on creative writing. Other menu links are functional rather than thematic  –​ “Chatroom”, “FAQ”, “Links”, and “Forums” (alex, “WrongPlanet has 505 members with 5235 posts”). In the current incarnation of the site, two key strands are evident in terms of the development of new directions in writing by and about autism. One subsection of the “General Discussion” section of the site, with 68,446 posts across 4,292 threads, is “Autism Politics, Activism and Media Representation”, where the latter topic receives significant attention and analysis. Under “Topic Discussion”, “Art, Writing and Music” is the second-​most popular topic (after “Politics, Philosophy and Religion”), with 165,891 posts across 99,845 threads. There are a wide range of threads centred around publishing written work (including threads on self-​publishing and its benefits and dangers), and threads where participants can post their creative writing directly to the site. Posts such as “Any Fiction Writers Here?” evidence community members with an active interest in writing and publishing processes, as do the variety of threads advertising individual contributor’s published works as either print or e-​books (e.g. “So, My First Book Has Been Published”, “My Book Is Being Published!”, and “My Autobiography Is Published”). Meanwhile, the “WrongPlanet Writing Showcase” is one of only four “sticky” threads on the “Art,Writing and Music” discussion board, and offers a venue for publication and feedback on members’ creative writing. Finally, the “general” section of the forum offers a space for members to communicate their everyday experiences, autobiographical segments, if not “complete” autobiographies. Overall, these texts demonstrate a consistent resistance to neurotypical editorial influences in autistic life writing; contributors recognise the potential for online communities to act as relatively unmediated spaces, protecting the right to self-​represent, but also to engage in literary critical readings of other works about autism or by writers with autism. Stuart Murray concludes Representing Autism with an appeal for “aggressive, proactive and provocative” care: a form of care between people with autism and neurotypical individuals that “demands that interventions are made, voices are listened to, and even that texts are re-​read in a fashion that has justice as its ultimate goal” (212). Digital humanities scholar Aimée Morrison writes that “digital life writing maps a realm with no gatekeepers, editors, or canons, producing texts to excess on a scale of production and publication that completely overwhelms the 374

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boutique reading practices of literary scholarship” (112). Morrison’s statement is offered as a challenge to literary critics, their methodology, and their reading; it also provides a potential response to Murray’s call for caring interventions and rereadings. Digital autiebiographies, particularly those written and published without neurotypical publishing constraints and gatekeepers, engage with different ways and methods of understanding and representing autism in popular culture and narrative, while demonstrating new modes of authorship, production, and reading. Both Women From Another Planet? and Wrong Planet showcase contributors who are self-​consciously engaged in literary critical readings, creative practices, and peer support. They display online spaces which allow for dialogue between texts and contributors, where forum contributors are both creative writers and critics, and where different roles and types of writing coexisting in one space within a digital format and community. More importantly, in the above examples people with autism are driving discussion and analysis; a prioritisation and valuing of lived experience that embodies the disability studies campaign slogan “nothing about us without us”.

Notes 1 The Curious Incident is set reading for module EUC 488: Multicultural Perspectives in Children and Youth, Department of Education, SUNY Geneseo, and recommended as part of the Postgraduate Certificate in Specialist Teaching, Department of Education, Massey University, University of New Zealand. As part of the UK white paper “Building Communities, Beating Crime:  A Better Police Service for the 21st Century” (2004), a member of the Government’s Learning Disabilities Taskforce recommended that “all police officers should read The Curious Incident”, p. 62. 2 For more information on autism and sensory differences, or diagnosis of autism alongside other disabilities or conditions, see National Autistic Society, “Sensory Differences” and “Related Conditions”.

Works cited alex (username). “About Wrong Planet”, Wrong Planet, www.wrongplanet.net/​about-​wrong-​planet/​. Accessed 2 April 2018. alex (username). “WrongPlanet has 505 members with 5235 posts”, Wrong Planet, 31 Aug. 2004, www. wrongplanet.net. Accessed via the Internat Archive’s WayBackMachine, www.web.archive.org/​web/​ 20040902083442/​http://​wrongplanet.net:80, 2 April 2018. alex (username). “WrongPlanet Rules”, Wrong Planet, www.wrongplanet.net/​forums/​viewtopic. php?t=73832. Accessed 2 April 2018. AlexWelshman (username). “My Autobiography Is Published”, Wrong Planet, www.wrongplanet.net/​ forums/​viewtopic.php?t=286847. Accessed 5 April 2018. Autistic Self Advocacy Network. “Horrific Autism Speaks ‘I Am Autism’ Ad Transcript”, www. autisticadvocacy.org/​2009/​09/​horrific-​autism-​speaks-​i-​am-​autism-​ad-​transcript. Accessed 2 April 2018. Berlins, Marcel. “Newton and Einstein May Have Been Autistic. But Is Their Genius an Argument against a Screening Test?”, The Guardian, 14 Jan. 2009, www.guardian.com/​commentisfree/​2009/​jan/​14/​ autism-​genetics-​ethics. Accessed 2 April 2018. Bérubé, Michael. “Equality, Freedom, and/​or Justice for All:  A Response to Martha Nussbaum”, in Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson, Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2010, pp. 97–​109. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Empty Fortress:  Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. Collier-​Macmillan Ltd., 1967. Bosley, Sarah. “New Research Brings Autism Screening Closer to Reality: Call for Ethics Debate as Tests in the Womb Could Allow Termination of Pregnancies”. Re-​titled “Autism Linked to High Levels of Testosterone in the Womb”, 22 Jan 2009. The Guardian, 12 Jan 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/​lifeandstyle/​ 2009/​jan/​12/​autism-​prenatal-​testosterone-​womb. Accessed 2 April 2018. Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies:  Disability in Contemporary Life-​Writing. University of Michigan Press, 2009.

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INDEX

Note: page numbers in italic type refer to figures. able bodies, and stage musicals 265, 266, 272 ableism 24, 25, 74, 116, 242, 243–​244; and the theatre 254, 268–​269 Access to Work program, UK 263 accessibility 2, 244; and the theatre 253–​254, 261, 262, 263; in tribal built environments 9, 18 ACK Lab 261 Acker, Kathy 323 Acorn, Milton 219–​221 actor training, inclusivity in 258 ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) 3, 31, 241, 245, 254 adaptation 83 adoption of Indigenous children 15 Advice to New-​Married Persons: Or, The Art of Having Beautiful Children (Quillet) 115–​116 Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Quayson) 156 African-​Americans: medical segregation 132, 133–​134; narrators 86; police violence against 234–​236; and psychiatric reform 138; supposed racial inferiority 151; see also Afro-​modernism; black disability studies Afrofuturism 23 Afro-​modernism 3, 132–​133, 138–​139; Hughes: “Berry” 134–​135; Hughes: “Home” 135–​138; medical segregation 132, 133–​134; psychiatric reform 138 “After Reading ‘Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River” (Antrobus) 236–​237 After the Blackout (Thompson) 258 Ahmed, Sara 73 AIDS 318, 324, 325; see also Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Wojnarowicz) AISL (American Indian Sign Language) 10–​11

Alaniz, José 353 Albert, Lyle Victor  254 Alexie, Sherman 10, 11–​12, 13, 15 Alice in Wonderland 90, 91 All About H Hatter (Desani) 158 All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism (Meunier) 13–​14, 65 Allan, Kathryn 83 Alter, Robert 144, 145–​146, 153 American English 195 American exceptionalism 168 American football 267 American Indian Sign Language see AISL American Modernist poetry 2 American Psychological Association: DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) 31, 33, 361–​362, 368 American School for the Deaf 46 American Sign Language see ASL American stage musicals 265–​266, 273; casting culture and representation 272–​273; diegetic disabilities 266, 267, 271–​272; disability as metaphor 269–​271; triple-​threat performers 266–​269 Americans with Disabilities Act see ADA Amponsah, Prince 258–​259 Amputees Guide to Sex, The (Weise) 245 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Frye) 147–​148 Andrew, Joe 283–​284 Andrews, Tom  245 Anesthesia (Fries) 245 Anglophone Indian fiction 3, 156–​157; Desai: Clear Light of Day 160–​161; Kanga: Trying to Grow 164–​165; Lahiri: “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” 161–​162; Mistry: A Fine Balance

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Index 159–​160; Rushdie: Midnight’s Children 157–​158; Rushdie: The Moor’s Last Sigh, The 156, 157, 158–​159; Sinha: Animal’s People 163–​164 Anima (Pincherle Moravia Rosselli) 204, 206, 209 Animacies (Chen) 348–​350 animacy hierarchies 197, 346 animal studies 63 animality 63 Animal’s People (Sinha) 163–​164 animorphism 200 Anjaria, Ulka 156 anthropomorphism 198, 199 Antigone 204 antinormative narratives of embodiment 167–​168; capacities of incapacity 170, 175–​176; Elkins: The Magic Kingdom 168, 171–​174; Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time 168, 174–​175, 367, 368, 369; Powers: The Gold Bug Variations 168–​171 Antrobus, Raymond 225, 233–​238 apps see HOAX project (Thornton) Arbuthnot, Dr. John 102 “archetypes”: disabled characters in fiction 147–​149, 148 architecture: and deafness 194; see also accessibility Arendt, Hannah 145 Armitage, Simon 373 Armstrong, Jeannette 216 Armstrong, Nancy 112 artists’ books 327, 329–​330, 331, 335 arts see cross-​media  arts ArtsClub 262 AS (Asperger’s Syndrome) 371; see also autism As Far as I can See (Leggott) 229–​230, 231 Asch, Adrienne 145 ASL (American Sign Language) 10–​11, 45, 48, 49, 194, 246, 260, 265; fingerspelling 52, 53; glosses 49, 53, 54; images 197; literature 44; performances 43; poetry 197–​201; TASL (Tactile ASL) 201n4, 248; theory and praxis of writing in English literature 51–​55; typographical features 52; see also D/​deaf  poetry Asperger, Hans 366, 367 Asperger’s Syndrome see AS Associate Writing Program see AWP asylums:Victor LaValle: The Devil in Silver 83, 86–​88, 92 Atherton, Raymond 276 athleticism 268; see also triple-​threat performers Atwood, Margaret 214 Audio Poems (Simpson and Simpson) 245 Aurora Leigh (Barrett Browning) 182 Austen, Jane 110 austerity policies 278 autiebiographies 366, 367, 368, 370, 372, 373, 374, 375

autism 3, 85, 279–​280, 366; high/​low functioning in 369; history and contexts 367–​370; Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism 370–​372, 374, 375; Wrong Planet 366, 367, 368, 373–​375; see also Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time, The (Haddon); Monster Girl (Fischer) “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact” (Kanner) 367 “Autistic Psychopathology in Childhood” (Asperger) 367 autobiography theory 373–​374 Autobiography/​Anti-​Autobiography (Bartlett) 242–​243, 243–​245 auto/​somatography  343 autothenography 317–​318 “Awakeing Deaf Theatre in Canada” conference 260 Awkward-​Rich, Cameron 3, 31–​42 Awonuga, Theresa  236 AWP (Associate Writing Program) 82, 248 B., David 353 Back to Back 307 Bad Doctor, The:The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James (Williams) 354, 362 “Bad Road” (Piepzna-​Samarisinha) 221–​222 Bahan, Benjamin 44 Baird, A.J. 241 Baker, Ava Ruth 370; see also Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism Baker’s Wife, The (Schwartz and Stein) 269–​271 Ballad of Black Tom, The (LaValle) 86 Ballin, Albert 48 Banks, Kimberley 136 Barchester Towers (Trollope) 126 Bard on the Beach 262 Barile, Alexandre 37 Bar-​Josef, Eit an 159 Barker, Clare 10, 156, 157, 158 Barnes, Steven 23 Barnett, Scot 349 Baron-​Cohen, Simon  369 Barounis, Cynthia 354 Barras, Charles M. 266 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 120, 182 Barthes, Roland 83, 324 Bartlett, Jennifer 219, 241, 242–​243, 243–​245, 248–​249 Bartmann, Saartje 58 Baudrillard, Jean 173 Baugh, Bruce 309–​310 Bauman, H.-​Dirksen  43, 48 Bauman, Zygmunt 282 Baumer, W.H.  267 Baylor, Lamar 268 BBC 263

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Index Beasts of Burden (Taylor) 63 Beauty Is A Verb:The New Poetry of Disability 214, 215, 219, 242, 248, 249, 333 begging 185–​186, 190; see also blind beggars begging letters 187–​188 Bell, Alexander Graham 48–​49, 196 Bell, Cece 253 Bell, Christopher 132 Bell Curve, The: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Herrnstein and Murray) 151 Beloved (Morrison) 286 Benjamin, Walter 318, 319–​320, 325 Ben-​Yishai, Ayelet  159 Berger, James 102 Berrios, G.E. 98–​99 Berry, Emily 236 Bérubé, Michael 24, 33, 34, 149, 151, 214, 305, 306, 369 Bettelheim, Bruno 367–​368 Between C & D 318 Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights (Lewis) 254 Bhabha, Homi 142, 146, 150 Bhopal 163 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (Green) 354–​357, 355, 358, 359–​361 biocentred egalitarianism 170–​171 biological racism 151 biopolitics 109 Biopolitics of Disability, The: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Mitchell and Snyder) 58, 109, 285 bipolar/​manic depressive illness 14, 16, 17 Birth Control Review 133 Black Crook, The (Barras) 266–​267 black disability studies 3, 132–​133, 138–​139; Hughes: “Berry” 134–​135; Hughes: “Home” 135–​138; medical segregation 132, 133–​134; psychiatric reform 138 black feminist criticism 40 Black literature 4; see also Afro-​modernism; black speculative fiction Black Mountain School of poetry 241, 242 Black No More (Schuyler) 22 Black, Sheila 13 black speculative fiction 21–​22, 27–​28; analysing disability in 23–​27; overview of 22–​23 Blacklock, Thomas 182, 186 Blackman, Lucy 366, 367 “Blind Beggar, The” (Symons) 183 blind beggars 183, 185–​188, 190 Blind Man’s Friend Society 191 blind people, working-​class 181–​182 Blind Summit 304, 308 Blindness, A Discursive Poem in Five Cantos (White) 181; blind beggar 185–​188; blind poet 188–​191; and depiction of visual disability 181–​185

Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing (Tilley) 182–​183 blood quantum 16–​17 Bloodchild and Other Stories (Butler) 21 “Blue Irises” (Leggott) 231 Bodies of Modernism (Linett) 193 Body Mutinies, The (Perillo) 224, 225–​229, 237 Body Undone, A (Crosby) 343, 345–​346 bodymind 22 Bodyminds Reimagined (Schalk) 354 “Boil, The” (Nowlan)  219 Bolaki, Stella 3, 327–​342 Bolds, India 268 Bonner, Marita 138 Book of Judith, The (Bulmer) 263 Borges, Jorge Luis 230 Bose, Chris 216 Boswell, James 99 Bourke, Joanna 278, 286 Bourrier, Karen 122, 123, 124 Bowen, Elizabeth 194 Boyd, Hugh Stuart 182 Boyle, Casey 349 Braidotti, Rosi 170 Brain’s The Target, The (Acorn) 220 Breath Tracks (Armstrong) 216 bricolage 196 Brilliant Imperfection (Clare) 347–​348 British Sign Language see BSL Broken Cord, The (Dorris) 10 “Broken Ears” (Thunderbolt) 17 Broken Kingdoms, The (Jemisin) 25 Brontë, Charlotte 182 brown, adrienne maree 23 Browne, Francis 182 Browning, Robert 167 Bruchac, Joseph 10 BSL (British Sign Language) 45, 198, 236 built environment: and deafness 194; see also accessibility Bullard, Douglas 49, 51 “Bully, The” (Clark) 245–​246, 247 Bulmer, Alex 258, 261, 262–​263 Burke, Kenneth 343 Burnet, John 46 Burney, Francis 97, 102–​103 Burning in this Midnight Dream (Halfe) 216 Burroughs, William  323 Bush, George W.  97 Busy, Howard 11 Butler, Judith 72, 306 Butler, Octavia E. 21, 23, 25 Byars-​Nichols, Keely  10 Cahoots Theatre  260 Caine, Hall 47 Calhoun, Claudia Marie 134

380

381

Index Called Home (Locust) 15 Callipedie (Quillet) 115–​116 Camilla (Burney) 97, 102–​103 Campbell, Jane 256 Canada: removal of Indigenous children from communities 15 Canada Council for the Arts 260, 262 Canadian disability dramaturgies 2, 253–​263 Canadian Liberation Movement 220 Canadian literature: pain poetics 212, 215–​222 Canadian Literature 220 Canadian Theatre Review 259 Cancer Vixen (Marchetto) 353 Candland, Douglas Keith 101 care 40; economic exploitation and emotional labour in caregiving relationships 135; and t4t 38–​39 Carel, Havi 75 Carlson, Licia 99, 150, 277, 312 Carolan, Turlagh  182 Carpenter, Mary Wilson  182 Carr, Cynthia 318 Carter, Elmer 132–​133 Cassuto, Leonard 58 casting culture, in musical theatre 272–​273 Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole) 4, 110–​114, 116, 117 catachresis 345 Cave, Marion 203, 204, 205 Cecil, Lord David 90 Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Queneau) 331 Certified (Derbyshire) 262 Chalifour, Spencer 57 Chambers, Ross 167, 176 changelings 97, 101, 103, 104, 105 Channel 4, 263 Chaplin, Charlie 48 “character-​system” of nineteenth-​century novels 121 charitable model of disability 256, 261 Charity Organisation Society 187–​188 Chatterjee, Chandra 160 chemical sensitivity 348–​350 Chen, Mel 197, 198, 343, 346, 348–​350, 351 Cheyette, Brian 145 children of deaf adults see CODAs Children’s Sea-​Shore House, Atlantic City, New Jersey 134 “China is floating past me” (Hyde) 231 Chislholm, Dianne 317–​318 Chivers, Sally 2, 214 Christensen, Shelly 153 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens) 271 chronic illness 74, 75, 79–​80 chronic pain 76–​78, 77, 78, 79 “chronic poetics” 137 chrononormativity 322, 324, 325

Chute, Hillary 357 Clare, Eli 4, 33, 175, 291, 343, 346–​348, 350–​351 Clark, John Lee 46, 48, 245–​248, 249 class see social class classism 24 Clear Light of Day (Desai) 160–​161 Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Wojnarowicz) 3, 317–​318, 319–​325 “closure” 337 CODAs (children of deaf adults) 43 code-​switching  52 Cody, Lisa Forman 112 cognitive ableism 99–​100, 104–​105 cognitive difference 327, 328, 330; see also dyslexia Cohen, Cathy J. 318, 322–​323 Cole, Norma 214 Collins, Wilkie 46, 47, 120, 124, 126–​127, 182 Collinson, Craig 330 Colonel Jack (Defoe) 104 colonisation 236–​237; Indigenous people in Canada 215–​217 Color Purple, The 268 Colossus, The (Plath) 206 “Comet, The” (Du Bois) 22 comic books 3, 336, 337; monstrosity in 3, 4, 57–​68; see also HOAX project (Thornton) Company 269 Considine, Paddy 279 “Constructing a Landscape” (Hall) 231 Contained 307 Contare i prigionieri (To count the prisoners) (Rosselli) 208 contemporary poetry, and disability 224; Lucia Perillo 224, 225–​229, 235, 237–​238; Michele Leggott 224, 225, 229–​233, 235, 237–​238; Raymond Antrobus 225, 233–​238 Contiamo infiniti cadaveri (We count endless corpses) (Rosselli) 208 Contiamo infiniti morti! (We count endless dead!) (Rosselli) 208 Cooper, Dennis 323 Corker, Mairian 344 Cormon, Cid 241 Cost of Living, The 290 Costello, Bonnie 200 Country Wife, The (Wycherley) 97, 100–​101, 117 Couser, G. Thomas 10, 71, 164, 214, 230, 236, 343, 366 Couzelis, Mary J. 10 Craik, Dinah Mulock 121–​123, 124 Crazy Dave (Johnstone) 10 Crazy for You 269 “crazywoods” 14 Creeley, Robert 241, 242 Creeps (Freeman) 254–​255, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263 Criminal Justice Act 2003 276 crip: definition 37

381

382

Index Crip Con 353 crip poetics 214, 215; see also disability poetics Crip poetry 1, 212, 245; see also disability poetry “Crip Poetry, or How I Learned to Love the Limp” (Ferris) 1, 241 crip theory 73 Crip Theory (McRuer) 79 Crip Time 75–​76, 84–​85, 86, 89 cripcature 272 crip-​face  272 cripped trans narrative 37 “‘Cripping’ the Comic Con” 353 Cripping the Stage 263 cripping up 272, 290, 295 critical disability perspectives 2, 74, 303 Crosby, Christina 343, 345–​346, 350–​351 cross-​media arts 327–​328, 340; Alison Stewart’s textile art 327, 328–​330, 329, 340; Deborah Humm’s multimedia productions 327, 331–​334, 332, 340; Ravi Thornton’s HOAX project 327, 334–​337, 336, 338, 339, 339–​340 Crow, Liz 74, 224 Cthulhu 84, 85, 86 Cultch theatre 262 cultural disability studies 35 cultural model of disability 278 cultural trauma: Indigenous people in Canada 215–​217 cure, rejection of 11 Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-​Time, The (Haddon) 168, 174–​175, 367, 368, 369 Curry, Steph 268 Dacre, Charlotte 117 Dacre, Kathy 258 Dakota Access Pipeline 19 “Dandelion” (Polk) 52 “Dandelions” (Valli) 245 Daniel Deronda (Eliot) 128–​129 Dark Matter (Thomas) 23 Dark Princess (Du Bois) 136 Darwin, Charles 167, 169, 176 DATT (Deaf Artists and Theatre Toolkit)  260 Dave, Paul 280 David, Lennard 193, 214 Davidson, Michael 1, 71, 230, 242 Davis, Jeffrey 11 Davis, Lennard J. 33, 35, 243 Day, Charles 191 Dead Man’s Shoes (Meadows) 277–​278, 279–​287, 281, 283, 284, 287 D/​deaf: definition/​terminology 43, 43–​44, 201n1 Deaf American Poetry 245, 249 Deaf Artists and Theatre Toolkit see DATT deaf characters in Western literature 39–​40, 47 Deaf culture 11, 245

Deaf, Disability and Mad Arts: Changing the Shape of Canadian Theatre 260–​261 D/​deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back 248 deaf drama 260–​261 D/​deaf experience  3 Deaf Gain 11, 44 Deaf Indian writers 10–​11 Deaf Lit Extravaganza 249 D/​deaf poetry 245–​248, 249; Deaf poetics 225 Deaf Poets Society 249 Deaf Republic (Kaminsky) 236 “Deaf School” (Hughes) 236–​237 Deaf and sign language literatures 4, 43–​45; breaking English 49–​50; “hearing line” in literature 45–​48; phonocentric norms and sign language disconstruction 48–​49; vexing the print page 50–​51; writing ASL in English literature 51–​55 deaf space 194 Deaf Studies 44 “Deaf World” (Valli) 197–​198, 200 Deafening Modernism (Sanchez) 193 “DEAF-​INISM” (Haroun)  50–​51 deafness 17; extent of 44; and modernism 193–​201; as relationality 194; and US language politics 195–​196 DeafWest 253, 265, 290 DEAF-​WORLD 44–​45, 52 Deans, Mark 307 “Dear Hearing World” (Antrobus) 233 death 325 Death, Disability, and the Superhero:The Silver Age and Beyond (Alaniz) 353 Decottignies, Michele 259 “Deep End” (Shawl) 25 Defoe, Daniel 97, 101–​102, 104 degeneracy 132–​133; eighteenth-​century perspectives on 110, 114–​116 Dekanawida 18 Delany, Samuel R. 23, 324 Deleuze, Gilles 273, 350 Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 195 “demyelination” 331, 332; see also MS (multiple sclerosis) Depression for Dummies 362 Derbyshire, Jan 261, 262 Derivative of the Moving Image (Bartlett) 244 Derrida, Jacques 48, 78–​79 Dery, Mark 23 Desai, Anita 157, 160–​161, 165 Desani, G.V. 158 “Desolate Spot, A” (Fransman) 337 Despite This Flesh 245 devil, belief in 100 Devil in Silver, The (LaValle) 83, 86–​88, 92 DIA (Leggott) 231

382

383

Index Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders see DSM Diallo, Amadou 87 Dickens, Charles 46, 47, 125–​126, 127, 182, 188, 271 Dickinson, Emily 204 diegetic disabilities in musical theatre 266, 267, 271–​272 digital publishing platforms 366, 369 disability: cultural model of 278; definitions of 24; as human variance 278–​279; and impairment 71, 74, 75; individual model of 229; journey metaphor of 333; as loss 230; medical model of 33, 71, 248, 278, 303, 367; as a metaphor 269–​271; and poverty 63; as social categorization 321, 322; social constructivist models of 327; social model of 71, 74, 75, 214, 229, 278, 303, 328; as a verb 2, 194; as a Western construct 18; see also intersectionality “disability aesthetics” 328–​329 Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives (Foss, Gray, and Whalen) 353 Disability and Difference in Global Contexts (Erevelle) 58 disability drag 272 disability drama: disability dramaturgies, Canada 253–​263; and intersectionality 290–​301; see also American stage musicals; Dead Man’s Shoes (Meadows) “disability gain” 71 Disability and Literature (Hall) 214 disability poetics 13; impediments to 214–​215; see also crip poetics disability poetry 241–​249; see also crip poetics Disability Politics: Understanding Our Past, Changing Our Future (Campbell and Oliver) 256 “disability rights model” 32 disability studies 12, 17; and care 38; differentiation between disability and impairment 71, 74; and intersectionality 58–​59, 290–​301 Disability Studies Reader, The (Davis) 33 Disability Writers Caucus  248 disability-​as-​performance framework  265 disabled sexualities 259–​260 Disabled State, The (Stone) 322 disabled veterans 299–​300 “disabled villain” 214 Discovery of India, The (Nehru) 157 “discursive dependency” narratives 71 disgust 37 Disney 268 “Distantism” (Clark) 249 distributive justice 322 Dixon, Patrick 76–​77, 77 Doctor Marigold (Dickens) 46 Documento (1966-​1973) (Rosselli) 208 Dodd, Chris 260

Dolmage, Jay Timothy 271, 361 Donaldson, Elizabeth J. 3, 353–​365 doppelgangers 113–​114 Dorris, Michael 10 “double oppression” 145; see also intersectionality Down’s Syndrome 10, 304–​305 Dracula (Stoker) 89 Dreamland Theater 83, 84–​86, 92 DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), American Psychological Association 31, 33, 361–​362, 368 Du Bois, W.E.B. 22, 132, 133, 135, 136 duCille, Ann 40 Due, Tananarive  23 Duggan, Eileen 231 Dunlap-​Shohl, Peter  353 Dwoskin, Stephen 76–​77 dysfunction 121; dysfunctionality of the normative body 168 dyslexia 21; Fabricback Novel (Stewart) 327, 328–​330, 329, 340 Eagleton, Terry  280 Eastman, Gilbert 54 Eastwood, Alexander 39, 40 Echo Maker, The (Powers) 174 Ecocriticism 12 Ecological Other, The (Ray) 15 education, and Deaf culture 11 Edwards, Jason 172 Ehlers-​Danlos syndrome  75–​76 Eigner, Larry 230, 241–​242, 245, 249 El Defo (Bell) 353 Electra 204 “Elephant” (Perillo) 229 Eliot, George 124, 128–​129 Elkins, Patrick 85–​86 Elkins, Stanley 168, 171–​174 Elliott, Ezekiel 268 Elliott, Paul 280 Ellison, Ralph 138, 139 Elmwood,Victoria  357 embodiment 13, 74, 83, 85, 86, 90, 109, 110, 112, 116, 117, 193, 209, 215, 227, 228, 241, 271, 272–​273; see also antinormative narratives of embodiment Emeney, Johanna 3, 224–​240 Emergence: Labeled Autistic (Grandin) 366, 367, 368 “Emily and her Sisters” (Leggott) 231–​323 Emin, Tracey  328 emotional labour in caregiving relationships 135 “Empire Strikes Back, The: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” (Stone) 32, 39–​40 Endgame 290 Enforcing Normalcy (Davis) 193

383

384

Index English language: American English 195; broken English 49–​50; English as a Second Language (ESL) 53–​54; glosses 52, 53 “Enjambed Body, The: A Step Towards a Crippled Poet” (Ferris) 243, 245 Enlightenment, The  99 enmindment 83 Ensemblist, The 268 environmental toxins and toxicity 348–​350 Epileptic (B.) 353 epiphanies 144, 145 “equipment for living” 343, 344, 345, 346, 349 Erdrich, Louise 10 Erevelles, Nirmala 12, 38, 58, 292 Erivo, Cynthia 268 ES Dance Instrument 258 escapism 89 ESL (English as a Second Language) 53–​54 Esmail, Jennifer 46 Essay concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke) 101, 102 Essay on Projects (Defoe) 102 Ethics of Vulnerability (Gillson) 305 eugenics 114–​115, 132, 133, 260 euthanasia 71 Exile and Pride (Clare) 346–​348 exploitation, in caregiving relationships 135 Fabricback Novel (Stewart) 327, 328–​330, 329, 340 “fabulous invalid” 290 Faces of Intellectual Disability, The (Carlson) 277 Factory Theatre  254 “Facts of Life, The” (Ferris) 244 Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight (Higashida) 366, 374 “false consciousness” 75 fantasy 82 Farmer, Joyce 353 Farnell, Brenda 11 Farr, Jason S. 109–​119 Fawcett, Henry 120 Felman, Shoshana 206, 209 Female Forms: Experiencing and Understanding Disability (Thomas) 226 feminine/​femininity 347, 348 feminism 245 Feminist, Queer, Crip (Kafer) 58–​59 Fences 290 Ferris, Emil 57–​58, 62–​65, 68 Ferris, Jim 1, 4, 13, 215, 242, 243, 244, 245, 248, 249 Ferris, Madison 290 Fetal Alcohol Syndrome 10 “ficelle” 150 Fictions of Affliction (Holmes) 185–​186 “Fights, The” (Acorn) 220, 221

figura 346 figural, the 34 financial assistance for disabled people: US 321–​322 Finch, Anne 98, 103–​104 Findley, Timothy  214 Fine Balance, A (Mistry) 159–​160 Fine, Michelle 145 Finger, Anne 350 fingerspelling, in ASL (American Sign Language) 52, 53 Fischer, Helene 57–​58, 65–​68 Fisher, Jane 305 Flacks, Diane 263 flesh-​made cloth theme 77–​78, 78 Floyd, Kevin 167 Focus on Disability and Deaf Arts in Canada (Jacobson and McMurchy) 260 FoldA: Festival of Live Digital Arts 262 folk medicine 133–​134 Food Court 307 fools 308 Fordism 168, 320, 324 “formal containment” 331 Forney, Ellen 354, 361–​362, 363 Foss, Chris 3, 353 Foster, Lindsay 307–​308 Foster, Sutton 272 Foucault, Michel 83, 116, 171 Fox, Ann M. 4, 290–​302 Fradley, Martin 280 fragmentation 196 frames 306–​307 Frankenstein 82–​83 Fransman, Karrie 337 Frazer, Bob 257 freaks 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 66, 76, 105, 172, 174; freak shows 33, 34, 102, 103 Freaks, Geeks, and Asperger’s Syndrome (Jackson) 366, 368 Free, Melissa 125 Freeman, David 254–​255, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263 Freeman, Elizabeth 322 French, Sally 344 Freud, Sigmund 113–​114, 115 Friatelli minori (Younger Brothers) (Pincherle Moravia Rosselli) 204 Friedlander, Christine 73 Fries, Kenny 245, 344 From the Sustaining Air (Eigner) 242 Frye, Northrop 83, 147–​148 Frye, Phyllis Randolf 32 Full Circle Community Center 84, 85 functional idiocy 98–​99, 100, 101, 103–​104 Furneaux, Holly 122 futurity, trans as 35

384

385

Index Gabbard, D. Christopher 3, 97–​108 Gallaudet College 11, 17, 46 Gallaudet, Edward Miner 46 Gallaudet, Thomas Hopkins  45, 46 Galton, Francis 114, 115 Gandhi, Indira 158, 159 Ganesh and the Third Reich 307 Garland-​Thomson, Rosemary 58, 71, 76, 270, 273, 278, 357 “gaze, the” 243 gender 25; and care 38; and functional idiocy 103–​104; and intersectionality 291, 292, 293, 301, 344, 346; see also Exile and Pride (Clare) “gender identity disorders” 31 genetic diversity 168 Genius of the Blind (White) 182, 188 genre 3–​4; and deaf literature 49–​50 genre play 84, 85, 87 genre writing 82, 83 “geographies of writing” 347, 348 George, David 309 Georgia Review 245 Gerland, Ginila 372 Ghosh, Amitav 162 ghosts 78–​79 Gilbert, Michael 276 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 176 Gilman, Sander 145–​146, 151 Gilson, Erinn 305 Giron, Leonardo M. 337 Gladwin, Bruce 307 glancing 175 Glass Box, The (Harris, Moy and Uchatius) 259–​260 Glass Menagerie, The 290 Glass, Philip 332 Glorious Revolution 1688 112 Glydon, Howard 47 Godfrey, Sarah 280 Gods Without Men (Kunzru) 373 Goffman, Erving 243 Gold Bug Variations, The (Powers) 168–​171 Gold, Sam 290 “Goldilocks in Denial” (Clark) 247–​248 “Good Bones” (Smith) 244 Goodey, C.F. 97, 98, 99, 101 Goodley, Dan 291, 368 Gopal, Priyamvada 156 Gordon, Avery 34 Gordon, Barbara 58 Gore, Clare Walker 120–​131 Gothic 4, 70, 79–​80; flesh-​made cloth theme 77–​78, 78; ghosts theme 78–​79; live burial theme 76–​77, 77; perils of 70–​72; stigmaphilia in a minor key 72–​75; vampire theme 75–​76; Walpole: The Castle of Otranto 4, 110–​114, 116, 117

Grace, Patricia 10 Graeae Theatre Company 263, 280 grammar 344; see also touch, grammar of Grand Coulee Dam, Washington State 12 Grandin, Temple 366, 367, 368 Graphic Medicine Manifesto 353 graphic memoirs 3, 353–​365; and psychiatric disability 353–​364 graphic novels: monstrosity in 3, 4, 57–​68; see also HOAX project (Thornton) Gravendyk, Hilary 137 Gray, Jonathan W.  353 Great Dictator, The (Chaplin) 48 Grech, Shaun 12, 13 Green, Justin 354–​357, 355, 358, 359–​361 Grimes, Sophie 229 Grosz, Elizabeth 169, 176 Gruppo ‘63 204 Guattari, Felix 273, 325, 350 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 3, 98, 104–​106 Habermas, Jürgen 213, 238n2 Haddon, Mark 168, 174–​175, 367, 368 Haggerty, George 110 Hairston, Andrea 23 Halberstam, Judith 35, 174 Hale, Sarah Josepha 90 Halfe, Louise 216 Hall, Alice 1–​5, 214, 327, 351 Hall, Bernadette 231 Hall, Kim Q. 344 Halliwell, Martin 100, 142 Hammerstein, Oscar 253 Hampson, Dennis 182 “Hands” (Valli) 198 Handtype Press 245 Hansen, Rick 253–​254, 261 Hargrave, Matt 3, 278, 279, 287, 303–​313 “Harlem Renaissance” 132 Harmon, Kristen 3, 43–​56 Harmsen, Machteld 357 Haroun, Abiola 50–​51 Harpin, Anna 276–​289 Harris, Daniel 235–​236 Harris, Emily Cumming 231–​323 Harris, Jim 214 Harris, Kyla 259 Hart, Moss 290 Hart, Phoebe 287 Harvey, David 171, 321 Harvey, Matthea 84, 90–​92 Harvey, W.J. 147, 150 Hass, Robert 225 hate crime 276–​277 Hatfield, Charles 356 Hausman, Bernice 35 Hayter, Gemma 276

385

386

Index Hayworth, Rita 267–​268 health inequalities 24 Heaney, Emma 34 hearing line 193; in literature 45–​48 Heart of the Hydrogen Jukebox, The (Lerner) 197 Heartland (Leggott) 231 Heaven on Wheels (Couser) 164 heavy metal poisoning 348–​350 Hedva, Johanna 73 Heidegger, Martin 349 Heir of Redclyffe, The (Yonge) 123 Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle, The (Andrews) 245 Henry, Joshua 272 Herrnstein, Richard 151 Hide and Seek (Collins) 46, 47 Higashida, Naoki 366, 368–​369, 374 high/​low functioning, in autism 369 Highway, Thomas  214 Highway, Tomson  10 Hillyer, Barbara 372 Hilton, Leon J. 3, 317–​326 Hinton, Janet 261 Hir (Mac) 292, 296–​301 historical trauma 209–​210 History of Intelligence, A (Goodey) 99 History of Madness (Foucault) 171 History of Sexuality, The, Volume One: An Introduction (Foucault) 114–​115 history, and writing 209 HIV/​AIDS 318, 324, 325; see also Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Wojnarowicz) HOAX project (Thornton) 327, 328, 334–​337, 336, 338, 339, 339–​340; HOAX My Lonely Heart 334, 338; HOAX Our Right to Hope 334, 337, 339, 339; HOAX Psychosis Blues 334, 336, 336–​337 Hochman, Baruch 147 Hocquenghem, Guy 323 Hoffman, Dustin 280, 368 Hogan, Patrick Colm 157 Hogarth, William  99 “Holding Up” (Wright) 54 Holmes, Martha Stoddard 185–​186 Holocaust, the 282, 354 Homer 182, 188 Homosexual Desire (Hocquenghem) 323 homosexuality 323 Hopkinson, Nalo 22, 23, 24, 83 Horejes, Thomas  201n1 Horrell, Barrie-​John  276 horror, and disability 82–​84, 92; Dreamland Theater: “The Language of Time” puppet show 83, 84–​86, 92; Harvey and Porter: Of Lamb 84, 90–​92; LaValle: The Devil in Silver 83, 86–​88, 92; Priest: Maplecroft 83, 88–​90, 92 Horror of Red Hook, The (Lovecraft) 86 Hoskin, Stephen 276

Hospital Poems, The (Ferris) 245 Hospital Suite (Porcellino) 353 Household Words (Dickens) 188 Huber, Sonya 73 Huggan, Graham 158 Hughes, Bill 71, 229 Hughes, Langston 132, 133, 134–​138, 139 Hughes, Ted 236–​237 Human Genome project 168 human identity 100 human rights 369 humility 200 Humm, Deborah 327, 328, 331–​334, 332, 340 Hurley, Erin 259 Hurston, Zora Neale 132, 133, 139 Hutton, R.H. 122 hybridity 3, 58, 84 Hyde, Robyn 231 hyperempathy 24 “I estranged” 73 IDD (intellectual and developmental disability) 97–​98; Burney: Camilla 97, 102–​103; Defoe: Mere Nature Delineated: Or, A Body without a Soul 97, 101–​102; Finch: “The Introduction” 98, 103–​104; functional idiocy 98–​99, 100, 101, 103–​104; gender and race 103–​104; intelligence society 99–​101; status idiocy 98, 99, 101; Swift: Gulliver’s Travels 98, 104–​106; Wycherley: The Country Wife 97, 100–​101; see also intellectual disability; learning disability identity, intersectional model of 4 idiocy 99; functional idiocy 98–​99, 100, 101, 103–​104; status idiocy 98, 99, 101 idiot 97, 99, 101 “Idiots First” (Malamud) 142; community and solidarity 152–​153; Jewish “superior intelligence” myth 151–​152; and otherness 144–​146; representations of intellectual disability 146–​150, 148; story outline 143 If I had Wheels or Love (Miller) 245 ill chronicity 137 illness 24, 74, 75, 79–​80; journey metaphor of 333 Illness as Metaphor (Sontag) 136–​137 images, and signed languages 196–​197 Images of Idiocy:The Idiot Figure in Modern Fiction and Film (Halliwell) 142 Imaginary Safe House 249 imagism 196–​197 Imarisha, Walidah  23 impairment 71, 74, 75, 214, 224, 327; “impairment effects” 226 “Imperfect Enjoyment, The” (Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot)  116 “In presa ad uno shock violentissimo” (Rosselli) 206 “In the Name of Pain” (Seibers) 212

386

387

Index incarceration 25 inclusion 305 inclusivity, in actor training 258 Indian Child Welfare Act 1978, US 15 Indian fiction see Anglophone Indian fiction Indigenous literature 4, 9–​10; blood 16–​17; colonialism 9, 12, 14–​16, 18; land 9, 10, 12–​14, 18; sovereignty and nation 9, 10–​12, 18; tradition and Indigenous epistemologies 17–​19 Indigenous people: pain of colonialism in Canada 215–​217; removal of children from communities 15, 216 Indigenous resurgence movement 19, 216 Indigent Blind Visiting Society 190–​191 individual model of disability 229 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act 1975 49 Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (Peters) 35–​38, 38–​39, 40 “Infinities of Forms: Disability Figures in Artistic Traditions” (Snyder) 215 Ingold, Tim  330 institutionalization 25, 85 intellectual disability 3, 142; representation as a “failed mimesis” 146–​150, 148; terminology 143; see also Dead Man’s Shoes (Meadows); IDD (intellectual and developmental disability); “Idiots First” (Malamud); learning disability intellectual sovereignty 10 intelligence society 99–​101 interactional model of disability 278 interdependency 343, 344 interlanguage 53–​54 International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, 1996 32 International Sign see IS International Year of Disabled Persons, The (1981) 18 Interpreter of Maladies, The (Lahiri) 161 intersectionality 4, 58–​59, 63; and black speculative fiction 25; and disability drama 290–​301; and gender 291, 292, 293, 301, 344, 346; and race 291, 292, 293–​294, 295, 296, 301, 346; and sex 344; and sexuality 291, 292, 301, 346; and social class 291, 292, 293, 296, 301, 346 intersubjectivity 212–​214 Intertribal Deaf Council 11 “Into the Scene and Its Impact on Inclusive Performance Training” (Dacre and Bulmer) 258 “The Introduction” (Finch) 98, 103–​104 Inuit Traditional Song  217 Irving, Lee 276 IS (International Sign) 45 Isherwood, Charles 292 Islay (Bullard) 49 Itard, Dr. Jean-​Luc 101–​102

I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature (Perillo) 227 “I’ve Tasted My Blood” (Acorn) 220–​221 Jackson, Luke 366, 368 Jackson, Sandra 21 Jacobs, Dale 361 Jacobson, Rose 260 James, Henry 129, 150 James, Jennifer 132 Jamison, Leslie 73 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 182 Janz, Heidi 261 Japanese Sign Language 45 Jarman, Michelle 10, 86–​87 Jarrett, Simon 98 Jemisin, N.K. 23, 25, 26–​27 Jewish communities: community and solidarity in 152–​153; “superior intelligence” myth 151–​152; see also “Idiots First” (Malamud) Jewish Disability Awareness Month 153 Jim Crow segregation 132 Johansson, Sven 258 John, Gareth 304, 306, 310, 311, 312 John Halifax, Gentleman (Craik) 121–​123, 124 Johnson, Beth 283–​284 Johnson, Lisa 291–​292 Johnson, Lyndon B. 321 Johnson, Samuel 98–​99 Johnston, Kirsty 2, 253–​264 Johnstone, Basil 10 Jones, Ian 336 journey metaphor of illness and disability 333 Jung, Carl 360–​361 Kadoura,Yousef 258, 259 Kafer, Alison 33, 35, 37, 58–​59, 74, 109, 291 Kahlo, Frida 226–​227 Kaleidoscope 241 Kanga, Firdaus 157, 164–​165 Kanner, Leo 366, 367 Kant, I. 38 Kaufman, George S. 290 Kavanagh, Arthur Macmurrough 120 Kearns Miller, Jean 370, 372, 373; see also Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism Kebbel, Toby 279, 280 Keddie, Nell 77–​78, 78, 79 Kelleher, Paul 103 Kelley, Walter  P.  11 Kelsey, Penelope 17 Kendall,Vivian 226–​227 Kenyan Sign Language 45 Kerr, Kevin 257 Kerr, Michael 276 Kesey, Ken 86

387

388

Index “Key, The” (Welty)  46 KickstART 257, 258 Kidd, Ian James 75 “Kilned” (Perillo) 227, 228 Kim, Jina B. 2, 193, 194 Kinder, John 299 King Lear (Shakespeare) 308 King, Stephen 84 Kinkelstein,Vic  229 Kipling, Rudyard 156 Kittay, Eva Feder 369 Klages, Mary 122, 182 Kleist, Heinrich von 311 Kolkata Sign Language 45 Krentz, Christopher 45, 46, 47, 193 Krip-​Hop Nation Graphic Novel (Moore) 353 Krumins, Diane 370; see also Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism Kunzru, Hari 373 Kuppers, Petra 3–​4, 82–​93, 212–​213, 272–​273, 280, 312, 345 Kuusisto, Stephen 245 LaCapra, Dominick 359 Ladino, Jannifer 199–​200 LaFargue Clinic, Harlem 138 Lahiri, Jhumba 157, 161–​162, 165 Lambeth, Laurie Clements 2, 227, 331, 333 Lang, Stephen 227, 228 Lange des Signes Français see LSF language: and ableism 269; language politics, US 195–​196; and sex 345; see also signed languages “The Language of Time” (Dreamland Theater) 83, 84–​86, 92 Larsen, Nella 138 Latimer, Tracy  259 LaValle,Victor 83, 86–​88, 92 Law and the Lady, The (Collins) 126–​127 Leader, Jennifer 200 Leadley, Allison 259–​260 Leake, Elizabeth 3, 203–​211 “learning difficulty” terminology 143 learning disability 3, 303–​305; as an aesthetic potential 303; and hate crime 276–​277; vulnerability as complicity 309–​311; vulnerability as interruptive value 306–​309; vulnerability as structural support 311–​313; see also Dead Man’s Shoes (Meadows); IDD (intellectual and developmental disability); intellectual disability Leavitt, Sarah 353 Lefebvre, Henri 318–​319, 321, 323, 324, 333 Leggott, Michele 224, 225–​229, 229–​233, 235, 237–​238, 237–​238 L’Engle, Madeleine 151 Lerner, Miriam 197, 198 lesbian literature: Maplecroft (Priest) 83, 88–​90, 92

Levinas, Emmanuel 213, 217 Levinson, Barry 368 Lewiecki-​Wilson, Cynthia  354 Lewis, Matthew G. 117 Lewis,Victoria Ann 254–​255 “Lexism” 330 LGBTQ perspective in poetry 245 liberalism 168 libertinism 110, 116–​117 librettos 269 “libtards” 97 Life magazine 267–​268 life writing 3, 343, 344 lifeworlds, of contemporary poets 224, 229 Light in the Piazza, The 272 Lilith’s Brood (Butler) 25 Lindsay, Rachel 362, 364 “Line Breaks the Way I See Them” (Simpson) 246 Linett, Maren 193, 194 Linton, Simi 2, 327, 333 Lion King (Disney) 268 literalism 34 “Literature as Equipment for Living” (Burke) 343 Little Green Man (Armitage) 373 Liu, Marjorie 57–​58, 59–​62, 65, 68 live burial theme 76–​77, 77, 78, 79 living dead theme 75–​76 Locke, John 101, 102, 103, 104, 105 Locust, Carol 11, 15 London, Jack 47 London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew) 185, 186 “Long Goodbyes” (Clark) 245 Lorenzo’s Oil 169 loss, disability as 230 Lost Girls (Moore and Gebbie) 91 Love, Heather 73, 80 Lovecraft, H.P. 84, 86, 88, 89 Lovern, Lavonna L. 11, 18 Lovesay, Olover 128 LSF (Lange des Signes Français) 45 Luck is Luck (Perillo) 228 Lucy’s Story: Autism and Other Adventures (Blackman) 366, 367 Luczak, Raymond 53, 245 Lyon, Janet 100 “Lytopedia” (Santini) 53 Mac, Taylor 292, 296–​301 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 98 Macdonald, Anne Marie 214 Mad at School (Price) 354 mad studies 354 Madness and Arts World Festival 259 Madonna Swan: A Lakota Woman’s Story (Swan) 15–​16

388

389

Index madwoman figures in comics 357, 358, 359, 359–​360 Magic Barrel, The (Malamud) 144, 150 Magic Kingdom, The (Elkins) 168, 171–​174 “Magic Phin, The” (Shawl) 25 “Magic Words/​Naksuk” (Inuit Traditional Song) 217 Malamud, Bernard 46, 142–​147, 149–​150, 151–​153 Man and His Symbols (Jung) 360–​361 Man, Paul de 101 Mansfield, Katherine 229 Mansfield Park (Austen) 110 Mantel, Hilary 160 manualism 45, 48 Maplecroft (Priest) 83, 88–​90, 92 Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me (Forney) 354, 361–​362, 363 Marchbanks, Paul 149 Marchetto, Marisa Acocella 353 Margolin, Uri 147 marketing 242 marriage plots in nineteenth-​century novels, and disability 120–​121, 129–​130; angel with a legacy paradigm 127–​129; healing storyteller paradigm 124–​127; queer go-​between paradigm 121–​124 Martin, Brent 276 Marvel Monsters #1 57 Marx, Karl 318 Mary Jocelyn, Sister 146 masculine/​masculinity 347, 348; in Dead Man’s Shoes (Meadows) 282–​285; in Hir (Mac) 298, 299 mate crime 276–​277 Maus (Spiegelman) 354, 357, 359 May, Charles E. 146 May I Take Your Arm? (Bulmer) 262 Mayhew, Henry 185, 186 Mazique, Rachel 45 McCloud, Scott 337 McCullers, Carson 195 McDonald, Anne 84–​85 McMurchy, Geoff 260 McRuer, Robert 58, 73, 78, 79, 109, 285, 291–​292, 318, 351 McVeigh, T.  305 Meadows, Shane 277–​278, 279–​287, 281, 283, 284, 287 Medicaid 321 medical model of disability 33, 71, 248, 278, 303, 367 Medicare 321 Meekosha, Helen 12, 156 Meet Fred (Hijinx Theatre) 304, 306–​313 Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race (Bell) 48–​49 Menabò (Rosselli) 204, 205

Mencken, H.L. 196 Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo  207 mental illness 354; and drama 259, 262 Mercy Killing or Murder:The Tracy Latimer Story (Decottignies) 259 Mere Nature Delineated: Or, A Body without a Soul (Defoe) 97, 101–​102 meritocracy 99 “Message in a Bottle” (Jemisin) 26–​27 metaphor, strained 345, 346 Meunier, Jen 13–​14 Meyerding, Jane 370, 372; see also Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism “Miami Airport” (Antrobus) 234 Michie, Helena 125 Miles, Sean 276 Milk and Honey (Leggott) 230 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot) 124 Millenium Hall (Scott) 109 Miller, J. Hillis 153 Miller, Joshua 195 Miller, Kelly 132–​133 Miller, Monica 136 Miller, Nancy 75 Miller,Vassar  245 Milne, Laura 276 Milton, John 181, 182, 188–​190 Mind the Gap 307 Minich, Julie Avril 23–​24, 31–​32, 45, 138, 193, 194 Minter, Shannon 32 “Missing Larry” (Davidson) 242 Mistry, Rohinton 157, 159–​160, 163, 165 Mitchell, Breon 329 Mitchell, David T. 3, 32, 33–​34, 47, 58, 71, 109, 134, 149, 150, 156, 162, 167–​177, 205, 265, 270, 271, 277, 282, 285, 287, 368–​369 Mitchell, Sally 123 modernism 139; and deafness 193–​201; see also Afro-​modernism Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman) 282 Mollow, Anna 58, 318 Momoday, N. Scott 10 Monster Girl (Fischer) 57–​58, 65–​68 Monsters at Work 57 Monstress (Liu and Takeda) 57–​58, 59–​62, 65, 68 monstrosity 71–​72, 76; in graphic novels and comic books 3, 4, 57–​68 Moody-​Freemen, Julie E. 21 Moonstone, The (Collins) 124 Moore, Alan 91 Moore, Leroy F. 353 Moore, Marianne 194, 199–​201 Moor’s Last Sigh, The (Rushdie) 156, 157, 158–​159 Morrden, Ethan 267 Morrison, Aimée 374–​375 Morrison, Toni 23, 286, 287

389

390

Index Morton, C.H. 267 Morton, Stephen 157 mother-​blame, and autism 367–​368 Motherwell, Robert 333 Mount Rainer 199, 200 mourning 74 Moy, Watson  259 MS (multiple sclerosis): Deborah Humm 327, 328, 331–​334, 332, 340; Lucia Perillo 224, 225–​229, 235, 237–​238; Patrick Elkins 168, 171–​174 Mukherjee, Meenakashi 156 Mukherjee, Pablo 163 multiple chemical sensitivity 348–​350 multiple sclerosis see MS Mulvey-​Roberts, Marie  73 “MuMu” (Turgenev) 46 Muñoz, José Esteban 269 murders, of people with learning disabilities 276–​277 Murray, Charles 151 Murray, Stuart 156, 366, 367, 368, 374 muscular dystrophy 18 Music Appreciation (Skloot) 245 musicals/​musical theatre see American stage musicals; HOAX project (Thornton) Musset, Alfred de 45–​46 My Body Is a Book of Rules (Washuta) 16–​17 My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson’s (Dunlap-​Shohl)  353 My Favourite Thing is Monsters [Book One] (Ferris) 57–​58, 62–​65, 68 “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience” (Hurston) 133 Mythos cosmology 84

Nehru, Jawararlal 157, 158 Neilson, Shane 212–​223, 249 Nelson, Alondra 22 Nelson, Jennifer 50 neoliberalism 168, 278, 280, 322 Nersshi, Bill 374 Neurotribes (Silberman) 373 neurotypical see NT New Moon’s Arms, The (Hopkinson) 24 New Narrative literary scene 323 New Right 322 New York City, in the 1970s 320 “New Zealand Christmas, A” (Duggan) 231 Newnham, Richard 307–​308, 311 Newsfabrics (Stewart) 328, 329, 329 Newton, Isaac 105 Next to Normal 268, 272 Ngai, Sianne 37 Niblo’s Garden 266 Nicholas Nickelby (Dickens) 127 Nichols, bp 217–​219 Nishida, Akemi 135 Nixon, Richard 321–​322 non-​verbal communication  369 normalcy, concept of 243 Northen, Michael 241–​250 “Nothing about us without us!” 265, 375 Nottage, Lynn 292–​296, 301 novel, the, origins of 3 Nowlan, Alden 219 NT (neurotypical) 369–​370 Nussbaum, Felicity 100 Nussbaum, Martha 369

NAIS (Native American and Indigenous Studies) 9, 10, 15 Namaste,Vivian  34 Nandy, Ashis 163 Napoli, Donna Jo 198 “narrative prosthesis” 71, 134, 150, 205, 265; in musical theatre 266, 270, 271 Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and Dependencies of Discourse (Mitchell and Snyder) 167, 270 narrators: African-​American 86; unreliable 86 National Arts Centre English Theatre 260–​261 National Association of the Deaf 47 National Autistic Society 368 Native American and Indigenous Studies see NAIS Native American Renaissance 10 Native Americans: and linguistic compliance 195; see also Indigenous literature; NAIS (Native American and Indigenous Studies) Native Son (Wright) 133 Native Studies Keywords (Treves, Smith, and Raheja) 10 Naturalization Act 1906, US 195

OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) see Green, Justin “Octopus, An” (Moore) 194, 199–​201 Oedipus Rex 290 Of Lamb (Harvey and Porter) 84, 90–​92 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) 148 “Of the Training of Black Men” (Du Bois) 133 Ojibwe language 14 Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein) 253, 290 Okorafor, Nnedi 23 “Olive” (Leggott) 232–​233, 235, 237 Oliver, Andy 337 Oliver, Kelly 335 Oliver, Mike 256 Olivier Awards 368 Olson, Charles 242 “On Human Loneliness” (Hughes) 133 “On the Marionette Theatre” (Kleist) 311 Once More, With Feeling: Five Affecting Plays (Hurley) 259 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey) 87 Only Bread, Only Light (Kuusisto) 245 “Only Way Signing Can Kill Us, The” (Clark) 245

390

391

Index oralism 45, 196 Oregon Shakespeare festival 292 Origins of the Species (Darwin) 167 Orlando (Woolf) 34 “Orphan Mute, The” (Burnet) 46 Orwell, George 308 Ossian 188 Osteen, Mark 214 Othello (Shakespeare) 285 Other, the 142; in “Idiots First” (Malamud) 144–​146 Other World  324 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) 125–​126 Out of the Crazywoods (Savageau) 14 out-​of-​culture adoption  15 Oxford Handbook to Canadian Literature 214 Padfield, Deborah 76–​78, 77, 78, 79 Pafunda, Danielle 73 Page, Tim  230 pain 278–​279; chronic 76–​78, 77, 78, 79; narrative preferences for 214–​215 pain poetics 212; Canadian literature 212, 215–​222; cultural trauma, location, agency 215–​222; impediments to disability poetics 214–​215; intersubjectivity 212–​214 Pamela (Richardson) 116 Paradise Lost (Milton) 181 Paris, Damara Goff 11 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 204, 205 Pastrana, Julia 58 Patsavas, Alison 212, 214 Paulson, Michael 253 pearl imagery, in Rosselli’s poetry 207–​208 Perillo, Lucia 224, 225–​229, 235, 237–​238 Perry, Bliss 146 Perry, Grayson 328 Perseverance, The (Antrobus) 225, 233–​237 Peter Pan 91 Peter the Wild Boy 101–​102 Peters, Cynthia 49 Peters, Torrey 35–​38, 38–​39, 40 Petry, Anne 138 Pettitt-​Wade, Ben 306, 308, 309 Phelps Ward, E.S.  47 Philips, Sally 304–​305 Philpott, Keith 276 phonocentrism 43, 44, 46–​47; phonocentric norms and sign language disconstruction 48–​49 Picasso Project 263 Pied Piper of Hamlyn, The 167 Piepzna-​Samarisinha, Leah Lakshmi 221–​222 “Pierre and Camille” (Musset) 45–​46 Pillars of the House, The (Yonge) 127–​128 Pincherle Moravia Rosselli, Amelia 203–​204, 206, 209 Plath, Sylvia 204, 205, 206, 207

Playwrights Theatre Centre see PTC “Poem With Fat Cats in the Background” (Acorn) 221 Poems by Mr.Thomas Blacklock 186 Poeti italiani del novecento (Mengaldo) 207 poetry 2, 3; ASL (American Sign Language) 197–​201; deaf poets 46; in trans and disability culture 34; see also contemporary poetry, and disability; Crip poetry police violence 86–​87, 234–​236 “political-​relational model”  74 Polk, Allison 51, 52 Poole, Adrian 282, 286 Poor Miss Finch (Collins) 120 Pope, Alexander 104 Porcellino, John 353 Porter, Amy Jean 84, 90–​92 Portrait of Charles Lamb, A. (Cecil) 90 Portrait of a Lady, The (James) 129 “positive attitude” 75 “Positive Obsession” (Butler) 21 postcolonialism 14–​15, 142 “Poster Child” (Luczak) 53 post-​structuralism  74 Pottle, Adam 260 Pound, Ezra 196, 200 poverty, and disability 63 “Power” (Ruffo) 216–​217, 219, 220 Powers, Richard 168–​171, 174 Prakash, Gyan 157 Pratt, Mary Louise 236 Preinvented World 319–​320, 321, 324, 325 Prelude, The (Wordsworth) 183 Premchand (Rai, Dhanpat) 156 Prendergast, Catherine 337 Preston, Jeffrey 287 Price, Margaret 22, 39, 354 Price, Scott 307 Pride and Prejudice (Austen) 110 Priest, Cherie 83, 88–​90, 92 primogeniture 110–​114, 116, 117 “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” (Spiegelman) 354, 357, 359, 359 prostitution 323–​324 proverbs 343 PRU (Psychosis Research Unit) 334 psychiatric disability: and graphic memoirs 353–​364 psychiatric reform 138 Psycho 82 psychoanalysis 115 PTC (Playwrights Theatre Centre) 261 PTSD 19, 297, 298–​299 Puar, Jasbir K. 58 Pulitzer Prize 292 “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” (Cohen) 322–​323

391

392

Index puppet theatre: Dreamland Theater: “The Language of Time” 83, 84–​86, 92; Meet Fred (Hijinx Theatre) 304, 306–​313 Purcell-​Gates, Laura  312 “Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts” (Shaw) 54 Quad Squad 9 Quayson, Ato 156, 205, 309, 317 “queer art of failure” 174 queer theory 72–​73, 74, 318, 325 queerness, and disability 89; Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole) 4, 110–​114, 116, 117 Queneau, Raymond 331 Quillet, Claude 115–​116, 117 Quintilian 345–​346 race 25, 354; and care 38; and functional idiocy 104; and health inequalities 24; and intelligence 151; and intersectionality 291, 292, 293–​294, 295, 296, 301, 346; and welfare systems 322 Racio City Music Hall 253 racism 24, 25, 116, 135 Radcliffe, Ann 117 Radley, Alan 335 Radway, Janice 90 Raggatt, Matthew 225 Raheja, Michelle 10 Rain Man 279, 280, 368, 369 Rawls, John 369 Ray, Sarah Jaquette 15 Re, Lucia 207, 209 Read, Alan 310 Reagan, Ronald 321, 322 Realwheels Theatre 2, 256–​258 Reason I Jump, The (Higashida) 366, 368–​369 Red Eagle, Philip 19 “refrigerator mother” theory 367–​368 Rehabilitation Act 1973, US 31 relationality, deafness as 194 relationship, deaf forms of 194 “rememory” 286 representation, in musical theatre 272–​273 Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (Murray) 367, 374 resistance, visibility as 2 resonant reading 40 “Retablo with Multiple Sclerosis and Saints” (Perillo) 226 Reynolds, Nedra 347 rhetorical sovereignty 10 rhetorical touch 344, 351; see also touch, grammar of rhythm 321, 323 rhythmanalysis 318–​319, 321, 324, 325, 333 Richard III 290 Richardson, Samuel 116 Ricouer, Paul 280

Ridout, Nicholas 311 right not to work 323 Right to Main, The (Puar) 58 Rimbaud, Arthur 319 Rimbaud in New York 320 Rinehart, Mary Roberts 47, 48 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 102 Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot) 116 Rodas, Julia Leigh 182 Rodgers, Richard 253 Rogue Agent 249 Rohrberger, Mary 144 romance reading, by women 89, 90 Room for Romeo Brass, A. (Meadows) 279 Roosevelt, Theodore  195 Rose, Joel 318 Ross, George 267 Rosselli, Amelia 3, 203–​209; writing and history 209–​210 Rosselli, Carlo 203, 204, 205 Rosten, Leo 152 Ruffo, Armand Garnett 216–​217, 219, 220 Rushdie, Salman 156, 157–​159, 165 Rushton, Edward 182 Rx (Lindsay) 362, 364 Sagetrieb 242 salmon 12 Samuels, Ellen 75–​76 Sanchez, Rebecca 2, 3, 48, 193–​202 Sandahl, Carrie 37, 109, 258, 291–​292 Sanders, James 257 Santini, Joseph 53 Savageau, Cheryl 14, 17 savantism 368 Saw, Evelyn 267 Sayers, Edna Edith 46 scapegoating 280 “Scars in disability culture poetry: Towards connection” (Kuppers) 212–​213 Schaffer, Talia  122 Schalk, Sami 4, 21–​30, 24, 58, 193, 354 Schertzinger,Victor  267 schizophrenia: HOAX project (Thornton) 327, 328, 334–​337, 336, 338, 339, 339–​340 Schmaltz, Eric 220 Schor, Hilary 125 Schuyler, George 22 Schwartz, Stephen 269–​271 Schwarz, Clair 282 science fiction 21, 22, 82, 83; see also black speculative fiction SCOPE 276 Scott, Sarah 109 Scott, Sir Walter  47 Scraping the Surface (Albert) 254 Searing, Laura Redding 47

392

393

Index Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf, Milan, 1880 48, 196 Secret Garden 272 Secret Life of Stories, The (Bérubé) 305 secular demonizing 100, 101, 102, 105 Sedgwick, Eve 72–​73, 117 Seeing Voices  260 “Self-​Portrait: Still Life. A Family Story” (Leggott) 230 “Self-​Portrait in Twenty-​Three Rounds” (Wojnarowicz) 318, 319, 320–​321, 322, 323, 324 Self Preservation:The Art of Riva Lehrer 175 self-​publishing 37–​38; see also Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (Peters) self-​reflexivity 307, 309, 310 Senier, Siobhan 9–​20 sensory material, in D/​deaf poetry 247 Sequoyah 18 Seraph on the Suwanee (Hurston) 133 settler colonialism 14–​15 sex: and intersectionality 344; and language 345 Sex and Disability (McRuer and Mollow) 58 sexism 24 sexual dysfunction 116–​117 sexual taboos 109 sexuality 25, 350–​351; and intersectionality 291, 292, 301, 346; and Rosselli 205, 206–​209; see also Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Wojnarowicz) Shaeffer, Katherine 57 Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper) 102–​103 Shain, Alan 254 Shakespeare, Tom 48, 278, 285 Shakespeare, William 98, 102, 285, 308 Shaping the Fractured Self 249 Shapiro, Joseph P. 150 Shaw, George Bernard 54 Shawl, Nisi 23, 25, 27 Shelly, Sola 370, 372; see also Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism Shildrick, Margrit 74, 212, 303, 309, 350 shlemiel 144–​145, 152 short stories 3 “Shrike Tree” (Perillo) 228–​229, 235 shtetl 152 Side Show 269 Siebers, Tobin 1, 4, 58, 212, 215, 327, 329 “Sign Me Alice” (Eastman) 54 Sign Writing  52 signed languages 43, 45, 46; banning of from deaf education 196; and images 196–​197; phonocentric norms and sign language disconstruction 48–​49; typographical features 52; see also AISL (American Indian Sign Language); ASL (American Sign Language); Deaf and sign language literatures

Silberman, Steve 373 silent films 48 Silko, Leslie Marmon 10 Silverstein, Michael 346 Simpson, Daniel 245, 246 Simpson, David 245 Simpson, Hyacinth M. 82 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 10, 13 Singer, Dr Judy 370, 372; see also Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism Sinha, Indra 157, 163–​164 Sklar, Howard 3, 142–​155 Skloot, Floyd 245 Skydive 257 slavery 132 Sleep (Rosselli) 205, 206, 208 Small, David 353 “Small Stories from Two Decades” (Leggott) 230 Smart Jews:The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence (Gilman) 151 Smith, Andrea 10 Smith, Cheré M. 244 Smith, Danez 233 Smith, Maggie 244 Smudge (Bulmer) 262–​263 Snake Pit, The (Ward) 138 Snow, Judith 263 Snow, Michael 332 Snyder, Sharon L. 32, 33–​34, 47, 58, 71, 109, 134, 149, 150, 156, 162, 167, 205, 215, 265, 270, 271, 277, 282, 285, 287 Snyder, Susan 3 social class: cultural narratives of 277; and intersectionality 291, 292, 293, 296, 301, 346 social constructivist models of disability 327 social justice 369 social model of disability 71, 74, 75, 214, 229, 278, 303, 328 Social Security Act 1935, US 321 social status: status idiocy 98, 99, 101 Sofer, Andrew 313 Soldatic, Karen 12–​13 Something to Sing About 267 “Sonnet 16” (Leggott) 231 Sontag, Susan 136–​137 Soop, Everett 18 Sorapure, Madeleine 373–​374 Sorensen, Eli Park 160 Sound/​Off Festival  260 Spanish American War, 1989  195 Special Exits (Farmer) 353 specific learning difficulties 328 speculative fiction 21; see also black speculative fiction Spiegelman, Art 354 “split feather syndrome” 15

393

394

Index Spring Awakening 253, 265, 290 Squier, Susan 336 SSI (Supplemental Security Income) 322 Stafford, Mark 336–​337 Stage Left Productions 259, 260 stage musicals see American stage musicals Stairs and Whispers 248, 249 Stallard, Sara 52 Stanley, Sarah Garton 260–​261 Staring (Garland-​Thomson)  78 Stein, Gertrude 197 Stein, Joseph 269–​271 Steinbeck, John 148 Steinberg, Deborah 73 Step into the Circle (Paris) 11 Stephens, Simon 368 Steppenwolf 296–​301 stereotypes 142, 150, 242, 244 Sternberg, Meir 144 Stewart, Alison 327, 328–​330, 329, 340 stigmaphilia: definition 72–​73; in a minor key 70, 73–​75 Stitches (Small) 353 Stoker, Bram 89 Stoler, Ann Laura 116 Stone, Deborah 322 Stone, Sandy 32, 35, 39–​40 Stone the Crow (Bose) 216 strained metaphor 345, 346 Stretch, Gary 279 Stroker, Ali 253, 254, 256, 261, 265, 290 Strombeck, Andrew 320 “Strumpet Song” (Plath) 206 Stryker, Susan 32, 36 subscription publishing 186–​187, 188 suffering 71, 73, 74, 79–​80, 213, 217 “Sum of the Parts” (Nichols) 217–​219 Sun, Pearl 268 supercrip 58, 214 Supplemental Security Income see SSI Sutton-​Spence, Rachel  198 Swan, Madonna 15–​16, 17, 18 Sweat (Nottage) 292–​296, 301 Swift, Jonathan 3, 98, 104–​106 Symons, Arthur 183 “syntactic fusion” 54 t4t (trans for trans) 38–​40 Takeda, Sana 57–​58, 59–​62, 65, 68 “Talking Horse” (Malamud) 46 Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (Leavitt) 353 Tarragon Theatre 254–​255, 256, 262 TASL (Tactile ASL) 201n4, 248 Taylor, Sunaura 63, 323 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 102 ten Kortenaar, Neil 158

Tenskwatawa 18 TERMS (The Extreme Randomness of Multiple Sclerosis) (Humm) 333 Terry, Howard L. 47, 48 Teuton, Sean Kicummah 9, 18 Teves, Stephanie Nohelani 10, 12, 16 texere (to weave) 330 Texier, Catherine 318 “text telephone for the deaf ” see “TTY talk” textile art: Fabricback Novel (Stewart) 327, 328–​330, 329, 340 Theatre and Accessibility in a Digital World conference 262 Theatre Passe Muraille 260 Theatre Terrific 259, 260 Things to Do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park (Wright) 353 Thinking in Pictures (Grandin) 366, 367 Thomas, Carol 224, 226 Thomas, Sheree, Renée 23 Thompson, Judith 258 Thornton, Ravi 327, 328, 334–​337, 336, 338, 339, 339–​340 Thornton, Rob see Thornton, Ravi Thunderbolt, Tristan  17 Thurman, Wallace 132, 137 Tilley, Heather 182–​193 Time to Put My Socks On (Shain) 254 Timm, Rose Lee 54 Tiresias 34 To count the prisoners (Contare i prigionieri) (Rosselli) 208 Tocqueville, Alexis de 195 Todd, Dennis 105 Todd, Zoe 14 Tomlinson, Richard 280 Toner, Patrick 219 Tony awards 253, 290, 368 Toolan, Michael 144 Toro, Guillermo del 84 touch, grammar of 343, 344–​345, 350–​351; Chen: Animacies 343, 348–​350, 350–​351; Clare: Brilliant Imperfection: Exile and Pride 346–​348, 350–​351; Crosby: Body Undone, A 343, 345–​346, 350–​351; sex, gender and disability 350–​351 Tourette syndrome 98–​99 “Towards a Rhizomatic Model of Disability: Poetry, Performance, and Touch” (Kuppers) 212 Towards Solomon’s Mountain (Baird) 241 toxins and toxicity, environmental 348–​350 traditional ceremonies, role in healing PTSD 19 trans 31–​36; as futurity 35; Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (Peters) 35–​38, 38–​39, 40; t4t (trans for trans) 38–​40 trans literary criticism 39, 40 Trans literature 3, 4

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Index trans studies: and care 38; and disability studies 31–​33 transgender identity see Hir (Mac) “transgender rage” 36 Transgender Studies Reader, The (Stryker and Whittle) 32 Transtromer, Tomas  214 “transvestites” 31 trauma: historical 209–​210; of Indigenous children removed from communities 15; and traditional ceremonies 19 “Treatment of Bibi Haldar, The” (Lahiri) 161–​162 tribal nationhood 11–​12 triple-​threat performers 266–​269 Trollope, Anthony 126 Trying to Grow (Kanga) 164–​165 “TTY talk” (“text telephone for the deaf ”) 49, 54 tuberculosis 15–​16, 18, 134, 135–​138 Turgenev, Ivan 46 Tweed, Hannah 3, 366–​377 “Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris” (Antrobus) 235–​236 Two Worlds (Locust) 15 Tyler, Imogen 276 “Tyranny of Neutral: Disability and Actor Training” (Sandahl) 258 Uchatius, Susanna 259 Ukrainian Sign Language 45 Ultrasound (Pottle) 260 UN (United Nations): International Year of Disabled Persons, The (1981) 18 underclass 133 UNDRIP (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) 12 Union Carbide 163 unreliable narrators 87 Uppity Blind Girl Poems, The (Wolfe) 245 US: financial assistance for disabled people 321–​322; language politics 195–​196; removal of Indigenous children from communities 15; welfare system 321–​322; xenophobia 195 “Useless Suffering” (Levinas) 213 Valli, Clayton 197–​198, 200, 245 Vanderhaege, Guy 214 Vanishing Points (Leggott) 230, 231–​232 variance, disability as 278–​279 Variance, Vagaries and Extreme Randomness of MS (Humm) 327, 328, 331–​334, 332, 340 Variazione belliche (War Variations) (Rosselli) 206–​209 vernacular speech, US 196 veterans: disabled 299–​300; Indigenous 10, 18–​19 Vick, Martin 312 victimhood, rejection of 11 Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron 102

Vietnam War  320 violence: and disability 162–​163; see also police violence visibility, as resistance 2 visionary fiction 23 visual sovereignty 10 “visual vernacular” storytelling see VV “Voyage of the Line” (Humm) 331, 332–​334 vulnerability 304–​305; as complicity 309–​311; of hate crime victims 276–​277; as interruptive value 306–​309; as structural support 311–​313 VV (“visual vernacular”) storytelling 50 Waggoner, Jess 3, 132–​141 Walpole, Horace 4, 110–​114, 116, 117 Walters, Shannon 343–​352 War Variations (Variazione belliche) (Rosselli) 206–​209 Ward, Mary Jane 138 Ware, Cyrus Marcus 260–​261 Warne,Vanessa 181–​192 Warner, Michael 72, 73 Warren, Adam Grant 256–​257, 258, 261 Washuta, Elissa 16–​17 Wasserman, Jarry 256 Wasson, Sara 4, 70–​81 “waste populations” 278 Waterfront Journals (Wojnarowicz) 320 Watson, Nick 48 Ways of White Folk, The (Hughes) 132, 133, 134–​138 We count endless corpses (Contiamo infiniti cadaveri) (Rosselli) 208 We count endless dead! (Contiamo infiniti morti!) (Rosselli) 208 Weird Tales 84 Weise, Jillian 244, 245 Welfare Queen 322 welfare system 278; US 321–​322; welfare check 321, 322, 324 Welty, Eudora 46, 194 Wendell, Susan 74 Wente, Jesse 216, 217 Wertham, Fredric 138 Whalen, Zach 353 “where of writing, the” 347–​348 “white disability studies” 132 White, Edmund H. 181–​191 Whitehead, Anne 328 Whitehead, Colson 23 Whiting, Susan 276 Whittle, Stephen 32 Wicked 272 Wiener, Diane 353 Wilkerson, Abby 351 Willard, Tom  50 Williams, Anna 182

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396

Index Williams, Donna 373 Williams, Ian 354, 362 Williams, Melanie 280 Williams, William Carlos  219 Wills, David 271 Wings of the Dove, The (James) 129 Wirth-​Nesher, Hana  152 WisCon 82 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 330 Wizard of Oz, The 91 Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (Klages) 182 Wojnarowicz, David 317–​318, 319–​325 Wolfe, Kathy 245 Wolfe, Patrick 15 Woloch, Alex 121 women: and care 38; in Creeps 256; functional idiocy 98, 103–​104; madwoman figures in comics 357, 358, 359, 359–​360; romance reading 89, 90; see also feminine/​ femininity; gender Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism 370–​372, 374, 375 Woodruff, Paul 273 Woods, Angela 328, 340 Woodward, James 201n1 Woolf,Virginia 34, 204 Woolly Mammoth 296–​301 Wordsworth, William 182–​183 work: right not to work 323

Workman Arts 259, 260 World Without Down’s Syndrome, A 304–​305 Wright, Aneurin 353 Wright, Pamela 54 Wright, Richard 133, 138, 139 Wrinkle in Time, A (L’Engle) 151 writer’s block 347, 350 writing, and history 209 Writing Deafness (Krentz) 193 Writing and Madness (Literature/​Philosophy/​ Psychoanalysis) (Felman) 206 Wrong Planet 366, 367, 368, 373–​375 Wycherley, William 97, 100–​101, 117 xenophobia: US 195 X-​Men series  25–​26 Yates, Samuel 265–​275 Yearwood, Mary Margaret Britton 372 “Yellow Wall-​Paper, The” (Gilman)  176 Yonge, Charlotte M. 123, 127–​128 Yorke, Stephanie 3, 156–​166 Yoshida, K.A. 368, 369 You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (Alexie) 11–​12 Younger Brothers (Friatelli minori) (Pincherle Moravia Rosselli) 204 Ziggy’s Wish 334, 337 Zoeglossia 248 Zubal-​Ruggiere, Rachael 353

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