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Representing the Erotic Life of Disabled Women: Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach and Anne Finger's A Woman, in Bed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
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Extract

Disabled women in literature seldom have erotic lives. Think of poor, crippled laura wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, waiting passively alongside her anxious mother to be taken up by a man. Or consider Gertie McDowell in James Joyce's Ulysses, the object of Leopold Bloom's voyeuristic fantasies, limping along, herself sexually blank. Even Eva Peace, the one-legged crone goddess in Toni Morrison's Sula, is done with sex. There is something at least untoward and at most perverse about representing disabled women as erotic. In The Sexual Politics of Disability, the sociologist Tom Shakespeare and his coauthors detail a long history of disability as a sexual disqualifier or as an occasion for perversity for both men and women in narrative representation.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 378 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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