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Harriet Tubman (ca. 1822-1913) is central to narratives of US progressive history and specifically black women's history. For this reason, she can easily be invoked in a historic acceptance speech by Viola Davis, who became the first black woman to win a Leading Actress Emmy in 2015 at a time when she had planned to produce and star in a Tubman biopic. Tubman has also inspired the establishment of a national park, as with the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, and won the popular vote in a 2015 campaign to place a historic woman on the US currency. She is even contemporized for modern audiences, whether that involves denigrating her in a vulgar spoof called the Harriet Tubman Sex Tape, which briefly appeared on and then was subsequently removed from Russell Simmons's All-Def Digital YouTube channel due to its controversy, or celebrating her in a satirized Drunk History episode on Comedy Central, as portrayed by Octavia Spencer. She also appeared in the popular television series Underground, portrayed by Aisha Hinds, who delivered an unforgettable monologue in her iconic role. Functioning as perhaps the most iconic black woman in American culture, Tubman's image, words, and story continue to inspire and provoke.
Despite her hypervisibility as a historic icon, Tubman, who is renowned for her status as an Underground Railroad conductor, Civil War hero, and woman's suffragist, remains invisible as a person with a disability. That is, her disability as an identity marker is downplayed. I raise this issue for a few reasons. First, Harriet Tubman has been heralded as an extraordinary individual with incredible strength resulting in self-liberation and the liberation of approximately seventy slaves from the antebellum South on the Underground Railroad, and yet her "superwoman" abilities remain a mystery for many-mostly because these abilities remove her from the realm of the ordinary and the everyday. Second, this image of strong black womanhood clings to a woman who historically suffered from a disability throughout her life, thus complicating the "strength" she embodied. Finally, Tubman was perceived as "illiterate," a woman who could not read nor write and therefore lacked the literary agency to make her own story legible in the annals of history. This last point shifts the critique of Tubman's disability from the...