"Curtailed of this fair proportion"? – Disability, gender identity and "embodied contingency" in english-language literature and television

Abstract

Disabled characters have been a part of English-language literature, film, and television since Beowulf. This project examines the changing depiction of disabled individual subjects in conjunction with questions of gender and community formation and argues that these changes partly stem from and interact with the increased awareness of contingency that Hans Blumenberg and others consider a defining feature of modernity. To enable this analysis, the theoretical frame develops the concept of “contingent embodiment” as an analytical tool. To do so, this dissertation combines phenomenology, disability studies and crip theory, gender studies, critical race theory as well as the new feminist materialisms and current debates around biopolitics and community. The analyses that follow cover Richard the Third, Frankenstein, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Holy City and Call the Midwife to trace one contingent path of enquiry into the depiction of disability from the sixteenth century to the present