Chapter 20 - Disabled Women’s Life Writing and the Problem with Recovery

Summary

This chapter explores how feminist criticism’s valorization of agency has at times erased disabled women’s accounts of bodily and mental pain. While praised in feminist circles, the concept of recovery, in particular, exists in tension with disability studies’ refusal of narratives that privilege ability. In framing this interrogation of recovery as a crip feminist practice, I turn to disabled women’s life writing, which charts how recovery’s normalizing impulse threatens to either misrepresent or overlook women’s impairments. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980), Anne Finger’s “Helen and Frida,” and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering (2018) redefine recovery as living with and alongside disability rather than in spite of it.