Exploring Disability

Too often, representations of disability in literature conflate the disabled body with the entirety of a person’s identity or relegate characters with disabilities to the role of embittered villain, clown, or victim. In this context, disability serves merely as a way for both the writer and the reader to define themselves as “normal” in contrast. However, the poets in this playlist reveal normalcy as a social construct and thus begin to subvert assumptions about the normal body, the normal person, and the normal citizen. They deform notions of normalcy and rewrite the disabled body not as a metaphor, but as one important aspect of identity.