Crip / Early / Modern: The Sexual Politics Of Disability In English Renaissance Literature
- ASU Author/Contributor (non-ASU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Evyan D. Gainey (Creator)
- Institution
- Appalachian State University (ASU )
- Web Site: https://library.appstate.edu/
- Advisor
- David Orvis
Abstract: This study inquires into the ways sick and disabled bodies bear a sexually politicized thrust within several dramatic and poetic works of the English Renaissance. I would like to add to the growing conversation concerning literary interpretations of disability by suggesting that disabled embodiment was often rationalized within early modern literature as a force of subversive sexual power—embodiment figured as not only improperly sexual but also, at times, hypersexual, threatening to the sociopolitical environments of the textual worlds I examine. To make this argument, I consider three Renaissance works—William Shakespeare’s problem-play All’s Well That Ends Well, Richard Barnfield’s pastoral poem The Affectionate Shepherd, and Thomas Heywood’s domestic tragedy A Woman Killed with Kindness. The social arenas depicted in these texts demand bodies to acquire able-bodiedness and, by consequence, sexual use-value and productivity, employing efforts of medicalization and social erasure to make this happy ending a happy reality.
Crip / Early / Modern: The Sexual Politics Of Disability In English Renaissance Literature
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Created on 5/31/2017
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Gainey, E. (2017). "Crip / Early / Modern: The Sexual Politics Of Disability In English Renaissance Literature." Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Appalachian State University, Boone, NC
- Language: English
- Date: 2017
- Keywords
- Disability, Sexuality, Drama, Poetry, Renaissance