The article argues that the treatment of angelic speech in B. Catling’s fantasy novel The Vorrh and its two sequels The Erstwhile and The Cloven (2012–2018) lays the groundwork for a conception of dysfluency that counters a trend of literary theory which exploits verbal disability as a metaphor for a defamiliarized and idealized state of language. Catling’s desire to explore an “alternative” view of dysfluency, influenced by his lived experience of a stutter, manifests through a multifarious depiction of verbal disability as both creator and destroyer of meaning. The dual role of dysfluency across the Vorrh trilogy permits Catling to explore gnostic tensions between the disclosure of knowledge and its obfuscation, epitomised by his choice to place the words of divine revelation in the mouths of aphasic messenger angels. The article positions the “alternative” as a different kind of theoretical framing, one which is not overloaded with qualitative terminology and does not treat topics such as disability as monolithic, but which focuses instead on the opportunities afforded by diverse experimentation.
This article contends that the social diagnosis of “difficulty,” especially visible and harmful in the figure of the “difficult patient,” renders the object of description as mentally and rhetorically disabled through implication of mental state and social illegibility. In a different rhetorical environment, that of poetics and literary criticism, the notion of difficulty arises as a critical category invoked to describe an interpretive resistance or blockage. Through a mad studies rhetorical analysis of these two distinct linguistic contexts for the term “difficulty,” this article explores the slipperiness of difficulty, and how all forms of the term rely on ideologies of normalization and saneism, even if in literary contexts these are sometimes obscured through metaphorization. This illustrates how mad literary criticism may mobilize literary theory to engage ableist rhetorics with creativity and flexibility to find positions of rhetoricity. Ultimately, the hope of difficulty is not of recuperation into systems of understanding, but its use as a reclaimed and resistant orientation always beyond the boundary of acceptability and legibility.
This article presents a reading of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian speculative fiction series, the MaddAddam trilogy, as a vehicle that forwards a critique of the exploitation and commodification of so-called Aspergian characteristics in science and technology sectors. Engaging with Ian Hacking’s concept of the looping effect, the argument is that Oryx and Crake , the first novel in the MaddAddam trilogy, demonstrates that the technoscientific competence associated with Asperger’s syndrome (a diagnostically defunct but culturally common designation) may be cultivated to produce a population of ideal laborers. In presenting this reading, the article connects the novel’s references to Asperger’s syndrome to the increasingly pervasive commodification of neurodiversity in the real world.
Crip time describes the varying alternative temporalities experienced by disabled people. Because lyric poetry operates on its own temporality, the lyric is a fruitful place to create expressions of non-normative temporalities, including crip time. This article reads two contemporary works of poetry, Molly McCully Brown’s The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (2017) and Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl (2022) for their expressions of crip time, 1 created through both formal choices like poem length, white space, line length, placement on the page, and book structure, as well as content decisions such as engagement with the nonhuman world and depictions of time travel. As these poems bend, syncopate, skip over, and pause normative time, they envision more expansive, more caring communities than those in which we currently live, suggesting that these communities can be imagined and, potentially, built, only under alternative temporalities such as crip time.
This article focuses on literary representations of women’s disability and its “cure” to explore the links among literary, political, and medical discourses within a colonial context. During the late nineteenth century, an important transition occurred in Bengal from the pre-colonial system to the colonial. New systems—of thoughts, education, governance, and, most importantly, human expressions—arrived in the name of a vastly appealing concept of modernity, thus creating tension between the existing and the emergent systems. Many political ideals of the time were translated into literary action, giving rise to new literary genres, language, and style. Such a new genre was novel. This article argues that early novels of colonial Bengal can provide glimpses of the construction of normalcy, which is inextricably linked with the medical discourses of the time, and the more extensive nation-building process. To substantiate these points, this article primarily draws on the works of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894), known as the first modern author of colonial Bengal.
American author Jesse Ball places his relationship with Abram Ball, his brother with Down syndrome, at the center of his lightly dystopian narrative Census (2018). Though a work of fiction, the novel’s often subtle but still undeniable centering of a person with Down syndrome can also be seen as a kind of disability life writing. This article analyzes the aesthetics of disability representation in the 241-page prose novel in light of Ball’s preface and his decision to include fourteen black and white photographs at the end of the published book. Counterbalanced by these two components, which assert the lived context and material experience of disability, the prose itself remains comparatively underdetermined. The refusal to name or diagnose Down syndrome in the text is complemented by other significant narrative omissions and hints at the insufficiency of language to convey the significance of social bonds other than indirectly. In the end, what emerges from the novel’s largely negative form of composition is a relational understanding of human experience.
Crip time describes the varying alternative temporalities experienced by disabled people. Because lyric poetry operates on its own temporality, the lyric is a fruitful place to create expressions of non-normative temporalities, including crip time. This article reads two contemporary works of poetry, Molly McCully Brown's The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (2017) and Diamond Sharp's Super Sad Black Girl (2022) for their expressions of crip time,(1) created through both formal choices like poem length, white space, line length, placement on the page, and book structure, as well as content decisions such as engagement with the nonhuman world and depictions of time travel. As these poems bend, syncopate, skip over, and pause normative time, they envision more expansive, more caring communities than those in which we currently live, suggesting that these communities can be imagined and, potentially, built, only under alternative temporalities such as crip time.
This article contends that the social diagnosis of "difficulty," especially visible and harmful in the figure of the "difficult patient," renders the object of description as mentally and rhetorically disabled through implication of mental state and social illegibility. In a different rhetorical environment, that of poetics and literary criticism, the notion of difficulty arises as a critical category invoked to describe an interpretive resistance or blockage. Through a mad studies rhetorical analysis of these two distinct linguistic contexts for the term "difficulty," this article explores the slipperiness of difficulty, and how all forms of the term rely on ideologies of normalization and saneism, even if in literary contexts these are sometimes obscured through metaphorization. This illustrates how mad literary criticism may mobilize literary theory to engage ableist rhetorics with creativity and flexibility to find positions of rhetoricity. Ultimately, the hope of difficulty is not of recuperation into systems of understanding, but its use as a reclaimed and resistant orientation always beyond the boundary of acceptability and legibility.
This article focuses on literary representations of women's disability and its "cure" to explore the links among literary, political, and medical discourses within a colonial context. During the late nineteenth century, an important transition occurred in Bengal from the pre-colonial system to the colonial. New systems-of thoughts, education, governance, and, most importantly, human expressions-arrived in the name of a vastly appealing concept of modernity, thus creating tension between the existing and the emergent systems. Many political ideals of the time were translated into literary action, giving rise to new literary genres, language, and style. Such a new genre was novel. This article argues that early novels of colonial Bengal can provide glimpses of the construction of normalcy, which is inextricably linked with the medical discourses of the time, and the more extensive nation-building process. To substantiate these points, this article primarily draws on the works of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838-1894), known as the first modern author of colonial Bengal.
The article argues that the treatment of angelic speech in B. Catling's fantasy novel The Vorrh and its two sequels The Erstwhile and The Cloven (2012-2018) lays the groundwork for a conception of dysfluency that counters a trend of literary theory which exploits verbal disability as a metaphor for a defamiliarized and idealized state of language. Catling's desire to explore an "alternative" view of dysfluency, influenced by his lived experience of a stutter, manifests through a multifarious depiction of verbal disability as both creator and destroyer of meaning. The dual role of dysfluency across the Vorrh trilogy permits Catling to explore gnostic tensions between the disclosure of knowledge and its obfuscation, epitomised by his choice to place the words of divine revelation in the mouths of aphasic messenger angels. The article positions the "alternative" as a different kind of theoretical framing, one which is not overloaded with qualitative terminology and does not treat topics such as disability as monolithic, but which focuses instead on the opportunities afforded by diverse experimentation.
This article presents a reading of Margaret Atwood's dystopian speculative fiction series, the MaddAddam trilogy, as a vehicle that forwards a critique of the exploitation and commodification of so-called Aspergian characteristics in science and technology sectors. Engaging with Ian Hacking's concept of the looping effect, the argument is that Oryx and Crake, the first novel in the MaddAddam trilogy, demonstrates that the technoscientific competence associated with Asperger's syndrome (a diagnostically defunct but culturally common designation) may be cultivated to produce a population of ideal laborers. In presenting this reading, the article connects the novel's references to Asperger's syndrome to the increasingly pervasive commodification of neurodiversity in the real world.
Around the millennium, disability scholars began to comment on the circulation of a stigmatizing characterization of people on the autistic spectrum in the news media.1 These reports, emerging after acts of mass violence, drew unsubstantiated connections between individuals seen or diagnosed as autistic and an aura of dangerousness. This article first explores how ideas of volatility have been associated with autistic identity largely through narratives around shootings. It then turns to literature to analyse how Elizabeth Moon's 2003 novel The Speed of Dark explores the impact of this troubling pairing and resists the association of autistic identity and violence.
Within disability studies and medical humanities, "retrospective diagnosis" has become a controversial practice associated with medical perspectives that fail to appreciate the complexities of the source material, thereby foreclosing further engagement or analysis. This article argues that some approaches to retrospective diagnosis can possess more radical potential, particularly when the interpretation is informed by crip politics. It draws responses to two famous, contrasting early modern portraits that have been subject to diagnostic interpretations linked to facial difference-Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Quinten Massys's The Old Woman-into dialogue with a number of disabled artists and writers who engage with historical materials in their creative practice, including Riva Lehrer, Polly Atkin, and Ariel Henley. This article thus employs insight from disability theory to bridge histories of medicine, art, and disability to demonstrate how diagnostic readings of historical sources can raise questions and, most importantly, challenge ableist assumptions of what the human body looks like. Reading diagnostically, perhaps playfully so, is not only the purview of medical practitioners, but a potential tool for disabled people to find historical representation, resonance, and inspiration for new creative expression.
Edith Maude Eaton wrote "The Chinese Lily" and "The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese" while writing in a discursive context shaped by violent socio-political forces that encoded disease and danger in foreign bodies. The mainstream scholarship on Eaton's life and work focuses on the author's diasporic positionality, and the few scholars who explore disability in Eaton's work approach it metaphorically, highlighting its negative attributes as a manifestation of imperial forces. Informed by disability studies and Asian American studies, this article examines two of Eaton's short stories in which disability appears neither as a stigmatic label that marks inferiority or danger nor as a symptom of imperial violence, but as a fundamental part of human experience. Using the trope of shared vulnerability as an aesthetic and analytical frame, this article argues that Eaton's immigrant figures use disability as a source of empowerment that allows them to share vulnerability, build unexpected care communities, and resist the combined forces of racism and ableism. Ultimately, the argument is that in Eaton's literary reimagination of immigrant lives, sharing vulnerability is an act of resistance and subversion.
The article adopts an auto-ethnographic approach to examine strategies in which blindness can function as a unique lens of perception, particularly as it relates to the expanded field of painting. Painting, in its current state, steeped in ocularcentrism, continues to uphold ableist ideologies refusing to acknowledge the varied potential of blindness. Disability, specifically blindness, as an art form continues to define its own aesthetic parameters, resisting categorization for which to engage in contemporary art discourse. When blindness is given attention, it is often framed through the lens of tragedy and overcoming, thus perpetuating stereotypes of pity and inspiration. If blind people are to become artists, usually they are introduced to sculpture for its reliance on touch rather than vision, but an art practice informed by one's own blindness can invoke new kinds of languages, a secret code that sets blind people apart, evading decryption. The article offers a presentation of the author's own art practice-touching upon various processes, materials, and methodologies of making-through personal reflection, all while developing aesthetic arguments based within the haptic realm.
The article analyses filmic portrayals of dwarfism and their emasculating content. The starting point is characters played by the famous Malayalam actor with dwarfism, Ajay Kumar (also known as Guinness Pakru). Drawing on Erin Pritchard's concept of "midgetism" and David Bolt's reframing of the forbidden relationship, which culturally constructs a prohibition on the sexuality and intimacy of people with disabilities, the article explores humorous, stereotypical portrayals defined by infantilization and asexualization. In particular, intimate relationships between dwarf characters and their average sized partners are considered in a comparison between the movies Mela (1980) and Kullante Bharya (2013). The latter proves progressive in relation to heightism but less so in terms of "midgetism."
This article imagines some theoretical directions for what is deemed as "critical OCD studies." Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is characterized in both clinical and cultural discourse as a preoccupation with order. This article moves beyond the notion of order making in OCD as a uniquely pathological aspect of the disorder and instead explores what obsessive experiences can teach us about living in an untidy and uncertain world. To do this, the article first draws upon Mary Douglas's classic anthropological text, Purity and Danger. It uses Douglas's theoretical framework to show how OCD is reflective of broader social and clinical efforts to assert order and control ambiguity, and how this desire for purity causes perceptions of disorder to proliferate. The second part of this article engages with the writing of literary critic Maggie Nelson in conversation with OCD to imagine ways of living beyond the disorder/order binary. Ultimately, it argues that a reconsideration of order and an embracing of ambiguity are integral to both OCD and society more broadly.
