Missing Bodies

Chapter 7 moves into the contemporary period by studying the relationship between bodies erased from the socio-political sphere and the missing body in the aesthetic sphere. For every newly visible body (queer, racialized, disabled) there are alarming numbers of missing bodies—disappeared in internecine conflicts, abducted in sectarian warfare, or rendered stateless by suspension of habeas corpus. To what extent have these absences been chronicled in recent cultural production and to what extent do these works challenge classical autonomy aesthetics? The chapter responds to this question through treatments of Indra Sinha’s novel, Animal’s People, the neurodiversity activist and artist Amanda Baggs’ film, “In my Language,” Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure, and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! These works look back at modernist precedents of appropriation, fragmentation, and displacement to examine contemporary arguments about neurodiversity, citizenship, and racial identity.

Pregnant Men

Chapter 5 investigates the idea of biofuturity within modernism, focusing specifically on the figure of male maternity in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Although the figure of the pregnant male occurs in ancient and classical literature it surfaces significantly among modernist works—Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias, Marinetti’s Mafarka the Futurist, Joyce’s Ulysses, Freud’s Schreber case—at a moment when biological life was being reimagined through the optic of eugenic science and comparative anatomy. Representations of the pregnant male foreground the spectacle of reproduction loosed from its putative organic site in the female body and displace it elsewhere—the test tube, the surrogate womb, the male body, and, not insignificantly, the novel. This displacement is both a queering and cripping of normative attitudes toward reproductive health and the futures that such embodiment implies.

Introduction

The introduction surveys the awkward meeting of modernism and the disabled body, summarizing the various ways in which disability is represented in modernist literature and art. The introduction also treats the formative role of disability in the aesthetic function itself insofar as ideas of autonomy require a contingent, vulnerable body on which to establish judgment. This sets the stage for a discussion of how modernist art and literature contribute to the disqualification of certain bodies, often using them as metaphors for cultural decay and social unrest. The role of eugenics, criminal photography, racial anatomy, and uplift during the Progressive Era contributed to invalidating certain bodies while reinforcing a normative national subject. The introduction also studies the connection between modernist aesthetic futurity (“Make it new!”) and the biofuturistic scenarios of medical science and genetic purification.

“The Rage of Caliban”

Chapter 2 focuses on works that mark the transition from fin de siècle aestheticism to works of high modernism. The primary focus is the role of embodiment in modernist aesthetics, specifically as it appears in music. The chapter looks at several works based on Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) in which the figure of the court dwarf represented in the painting becomes a site for anxieties about bodily and sexual difference. Alexander Zemlinsky’s opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) from 1922 is the primary text, based on Oscar Wilde’s story “The Birthday of the Infanta” (1891). The libretto for Zemlinsky’s opera by George Klaren transforms Wilde’s story of recognition and betrayal into an allegory of dysgenic characterology, based on the work of Otto Weininger. What Wilde perceived as a story about the noble soul beneath the grotesque body, Zemlinsky transformed into a eugenicist allegory of man’s fatal alliance with the femme fatale. As a work that embodies elements of late Romantic chromaticism as well as modernist atonality, Der Zwerg is a site for studying musical representation of bodily difference.

Cleavings

Using poems by Emily Dickinson and recent work in cultural and queer theory, this final chapter explores the fine line between “gain” and “loss” in disability studies. Using the author’s own experience of gradual hearing loss, the chapter argues that recent claims for the positive values of “deaf gain” through the use of American Sign Language have vaunted possibilities of cultural inclusiveness to the exclusion of affective realms of frustration, loss, and failure that are seldom acknowledged experiences of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. While endorsing the general thrust of Deaf Gain and its implications for the larger context of disability, the chapter argues for a more critical understanding of loss in the politics of gain.

Exquisite Corporeality

Chapter 3 intervenes in debates about whether the historic avant-garde (Dada, Futurism, Surrealism) represented a general tendency within modernism or a critical alternative to ideas of artisanal autonomy. The impact of World War I on medical, prosthetic, and psychoanalytic technologies was instrumental among postwar artists in imagining a damaged, wounded, or psychotic body. If the body could be seen as fragmented, recombined, and disjointed, as it was in Surrealism, it could also be imagined as promising a different ontology, one in which fragmentation or madness could be enlisted in revolutionary projects. Through readings of F. T. Marinetti’s novel, Mafarka the Futurist, Tristan Tzara’s The Gas Heart, and the self-portraiture of Frida Kahlo, the chapter explores works in which bodies are removed from narratives of reproductive futurity, organic coherence, and normalcy and seen through the optic of disability.

“Every Man his Specialty”

Chapter 4 discusses the dialectics of dependency—the interplay between a social contract based on free, equal agents and one that recognizes contingent interrelationships—by looking at one modernist writer, Samuel Beckett, whose work challenges liberal theories of autonomy and independent agency. Beckett’s characters are often disabled and exist in tragi-comic relations of co-dependence that seem to mock communitarian ideals of charity and mutual aid while laying bare the edifice of liberal individualism. Through readings of Happy Days, Rough for Theater I, and Endgame this chapter complicates disability rights’ advocacy of independent living while building upon recent developments in dependency theory advanced by Eva Feder Kittay, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum.

Uncanny Encounters

The emergence of affect theory has returned the body to cultural theory by stressing the phenomenological impact of bodies on other bodies. Chapter 6 opens with a reading of Baudelaire’s “Une Passante” that offers one such instance. Despite its emphasis on what Lauren Berlant calls the “messy dynamics of attachment,” affect theory has not attended to disability where the encounter with the non-traditional body incites emotions of anxiety, confusion, and in some cases solidarity. This chapter explores a structure of feeling around dynamic historical changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through works by Sigmund Freud, Frank Norris, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Toomer. Each illustrates stages in what Sara Ahmed calls “dramas of contingency” by which world historical changes are registered through quotidian moments of attention and confrontation. These stages mark a trajectory in the novel, from Realism and Naturalism to the modernism of Woolf and Toomer.

Invalid Modernism

The opening chapter discusses representations of the aesthete and convalescent as seminal figures in the late nineteenth-century formation of modernist art and literature. Unlike the more fashionable treatment of disease in the Victorian period, embodied often in the figure of the female invalid, modernist representations of disease or illness were more likely to be considered pathological, subject to increasing medicalization, diagnosis, and incarceration. The figures of the male aesthete and convalescent offer a more transgressive model to ideals of health and improvement by which modernity is measured. This figure was, not insignificantly, formative in the appearance of the sexual other or “invert” in sexological research. By looking at several writers—Friedrich Nietzsche, John Addington Symonds, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—this opening chapter seeks a correlation between the aesthetic and the body, between autonomy and contagion.