Disability studies has long grappled with what Leonard Davis describes as the conflict of the norm, where “normal” designates both an average state understood to be typical and an ideal state towards which individuals must strive. Texts such as Maren Linett’s Literary Bioethics, Jeremy Colangelo’s Diaphanous Bodies, Michael Davidson’s Invalid Modernism, and Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics all engage with this problem in one way or another as it relates to matters of ability, race, sex, and species.

This panel takes the problematic of normalcy’s conflation of average and ideal and turns it back on itself, asking how the way texts navigate this double-bind is affected by other ideas relating to what constitutes the human or the non human: both in terms of the other-than-human (the animal, the machine) as well as the excluded-from-human (non-white people, women, disabled people). By exploring how these problematized figures move within and without the concept of “humanity,” this panel sketches a pathway beyond the “normal” and its many restrictions.

In his paper, “‘The body extended into machine’: Orthopedic Disability and the ‘Mechanical Man’ in Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Rafael Hernández reads D. H. Lawrence’s illustration of masculinity and orthopedic disability in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) in the context of Italian Futurism. Specifically, he draws thematic and ideological connections between Clifford Chatterley’s paraplegia and wheelchair use with Filippo Marinetti’s futurist vision of the “mechanical man” or “extended man” whose exchangeable parts would “liberate him from the idea of death.” Marinetti’s vision of human-machine marriage draws attention to Clifford’s wheelchair use and his association throughout the novel with heavy industry, mechanization, and romantic detachment—all while Lawrence paints a competing vision of idealized masculinity as warm, pastoral, based in physical touch and “natural” sexual reproduction. The central tension in Lady Chatterley’s Lover between cold mechanization and the warmth of bodily touch falls prey to ableist attitudes of corporeal wholeness and “proper” function. In contrast to Marinetti’s celebration of mechanical bodies, Lawrence treats Clifford’s paralysis and assistive technology with disgust. This presentation thus examines Marinetti’s influence on Lady Chatterley’s Lover while likewise considering Lawrence’s various departures from Futurism’s celebration of the machine.

In “Resisting Recuperation of Black Disabled Womanhood in Toni Morrison’s Love,” Sarita Cannon investigates how nonnormative bodyminds pervade Toni Morrison’s corpus: Pilate in Song of Solomon lacks a navel; Thérèse in Tar Baby is blind; Nan in Beloved is an enslaved wet nurse with one arm. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that while many of Morrison’s Black female characters “are excluded from the cultural center because of [their] deviant bodily marks or configurations. . . they possess a narrative power, often associated with the supernatural, that far outstrips the marginal social status” (115). She expands on Garland-Thomson’s analysis by examining a character in Morrison’s 2003 novel Love: Junior Viviane, whose mangled foot is a source of shame and eroticism. Like other disabled Black women in Morrison’s novels, Junior is exercises agency, but she is incredibly selfish and lacks the “narrative power” of her counterparts. Junior thus complicates the recuperation of Black female disabled characters in Morrison’s earlier work.

Lastly, in his paper “Rhetorics of Selfhood: Neuroqueer Representations in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Jeremy Colangelo draws on recent work by scholars like Melanie Yergeau and Nick Walker on the intersections of rhetorical theory and neurodiversity to investigate the persistent challenges of self-representation which pervade Joyce’s novel. Despite being understood and described in A Portrait and Ulysses as a gifted author, Steven Dedalus’s experience of language and rhetoric is marked by difficulty and failure. This paper argues that, through an understanding of neuroqueerness as it pertains to rhetoric, we can see how Steven’s capacity for language evolves not in opposition, but in response, to these challenges – that he becomes an author not because language is easy, but because it is hard. Steven’s escape from Ireland at the end of A Portrait should thus be seen less as an embrace of an artistic destiny, than of an escape from the dehumanizing over-simplifications of others, against which Steven struggles from the novel’s earliest pages.

Together, these papers extend and complicate our understanding of the relationship between normative, ideal, and actually-existing forms of embodiment.