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Abstract
“Crip Modernisms: The Roots of Disability Consciousness in American Literature and Culture” establishes the relationship between U.S. modernism and early disability identity. To date, literary discussions of disability before the mid-twentieth century emphasize the eugenic prejudices then-endemic to U.S. culture. There is a shortage of attention to early activist disability representations in current scholarship, due in part to the assumption that disability advocacy began in the 1960s. “Crip Modernisms,” however, uncovers criticism of eugenics and rehabilitation discourses within artistic and activist production by and about people with disabilities in the 1930s and ’40s. I argue that many of these critiques were manifested through modernism—defined as experimental literary and cultural production in the first half of the twentieth century—therefore providing alternative representations of disability that display the rich and multivalent responses to ableism during this time period. As an interdisciplinary project grounded in archival research, “Crip Modernisms” brings together modernist studies, disability studies, critical race studies, gender studies, and medical humanities. This dissertation demonstrates that through resistance to certain medical, legal, and social pathologizing discourses, disability became a form of solidarity in the 1930s and ’40s and that these cultural shifts were reflected in the poetry, memoir, fiction, and film of the time. In full, I argue that modernist literary production played a key role in resisting pathological notions of disability, whether through the critiques of medical segregation by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, or the neglected works of feminist memoirists that argue against gendered ableism. In this way, “Crip Modernisms” highlights the vocality of disabled subjects in the early twentieth century while offering new understandings of the ways in which modernism countered dominant ableist cultures.