
Both the characters of Philomela from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lavinia from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus are raped and have their tongues cut out. Both characters also communicate despite this tragedy and Philomela specifically transforms into a nightingale—a traditional symbol for poetry, music, and poetic expression. Disability Studies scholar Lennard Davis notes that this symbol is important as it shows there is a cultural/ conceptual connection between artistic expression and “dumbness”.

Dumbness, Female Characters, and the Literary Tradition


Despite the fact that poems are comprised of words, poetry frequently features themes that value experience outside of speech or words, such as the focus on senses (touch, smell, etc.) found in the poetry of Raymond Luczack and the work of disabled writer Petra Kuppers. Kuppers and other scholars argue that the flexibility of poetry as well as the focus on the experience of the individual makes poetry a perfect vehicle for communicating about the disabled experience and the aforementioned perceptions/ communication beyond words.

The Disabled Experience in Poetry

Disabled poets frequently employ staccato language and words or imagery often dismissed by those who use purely person-first language or terms like “differently abled”. The poetry of Cheryl Marie Wade is one example of this as she employs words such as “gimp” and “crip”. This is fairly common in post ADA poetry and some poets refer to all purposefully unusual and brusque poetry by disabled poets as “crip poetry”.

Crip Poetry

Some disabled scholars and poets, such as writer Jim Ferris, cite the work of Emily Dickinson as an early source of disabled poetry that specifically focuses on the body and the experience of living in an othered or ill body. Dickinson specifically communicates some elements of this experience with broken lines and staccato language—practices that are still used frequently in disabled poetry of today.

History of Disability in American Poetry

Disabled poetry frequently uses free verse or obviously augmented versions of metered or form poetry (sonnet, limerick, etc.) as a way of defying the normal conventions of a poems “body”. In this way, disabled poets are not only disobeying rules set forth for the body of a poem, they are also, in turn, making a comment about bodily conventions/ questioning what defines a body.

Questioning the Body in Disabled Poetry

Disability has been a longstanding tradition in literature and poetic verse. There is a strong tradition of employing disabled (and especially mute) female characters who communicate their message, truth, or trauma via unusual means and often these female characters represent creativity, truth, justice, or the spirit of poetic expression. Examples include the character of Philomela from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lavinia from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. 

Claremont Graduate University

In the 1970s and 1980s, disability studies was predominantly headed by scholars and researchers employing a political and sociological focus. In the late 1980s and 1990s disability studies was popularized in the humanities and arts after being brought into the academic conversation by those in cultural studies. Around the 90s scholars therefore began looking to literature as a source of cultural commentary concerning disability and normalcy.

Disability Studies in the Arts and Humanities

Hall, A. (2016). Literature and disability (Ser. Literature and contemporary thought). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Literature and Disability


Once disability studies became a topic of discussion in the arts and humanities some scholars, such as Lennard Davis, began to question whether or not readers had considered certain authors, such as John Keats and John Milton, disabled. Some scholars support this as an appropriate way to identify and consider disability that others might have overlooked while others view this as a form of historical revisionism.


Disability Studies and the View of Authors


Some scholars looked for disabled characters in literature and attempt to analyze whether or not their disabilities are villainized or else seen as a punishment for immorality/ wrong-doing. This specific area of study is commonly referred to as the study of the literary “moral index”.


Moral Index of Disabled Characters


Scholar Lennard Davis looks at literature as a cultural expression  of major viewpoints and a vehicle by which the writer pushes major notions about productivity, morality, and way of being. This practice as a whole is named “enforcing normalcy”.


Enforcing Normalcy in Literature


Some scholars attempt to avoid generalizing the aims of literary works in their portrayals of normalcy and disability by acknowledging the nuanced space many works inhabit in creating an amalgamation of personal opinion, consideration of the audience, cultural and historical influence, etc. This more considered approach to analyzing literature with regard to culture, history, and disability is known as the “semiotics of culture”. 


The Semiotics of Culture


Many early scholars in the study of disability studies under the umbrella of the arts and humanities are commonly referred to as “first wave” disability scholars of the arts. These scholars are usually marked by their naming of new concepts and theories and some degree of generalizations. First wave disability scholars in the arts/ humanities are also marked by a general suspicion towards the way disabilities are used and portrayed in literature. 


First Wave Disability Studies Scholars in the Arts and Humanities

Physical disabilities are portrayed in literature somewhat frequently. In fact, physical disability is the most common type of disability portrayed in literature. It is also the most commonly studied depiction of disability in literature by humanities scholars. 

Physical Disability in Literature

Deafness is often a highly contested or difficult topic in the arts and humanities as some find work featuring deaf characters often centers oralist ways of being or presents oralist pedagogies. Even if the play/ novel/ media does not present oralist concepts, non-D/deaf persons often interpret the deafness as a metaphor. Despite these contentions, Deafness is still popular and common in the Arts & Humanities and Deaf Studies frequently discuss the arts.

Deafness in the Arts and Humanities

Blindness is fairly common in the Arts and Humanities and often is used to discuss topics or themes such as empathy, intimacy, and agency/ dependence. Often blindness is used by non-blind/ seeing writers/ creators to further conceptions of normalcy or discuss independence, particularly in Anglophone literature, though this is beginning to shift. 

Blindness in the Arts and Humanities

Writers have attempted to portray cognitive difference in the novel many times, typically by way of narration. One famous example is found in The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. The first section is narrated by a character many call "an idiot" and Faulkner himself called this a failure. This highlights one of many issues with writing from the perspective of those with cognitive difference- the difficulty or else impossibility of doing so when one is not cognitively different themselves.

Cognitive Difference and Narrative

Disability in Poetry

Cheyne writes that genre fiction is primarily affective, building off of the same theories employed by Berlant. By their estimation, genre fiction (science fiction, horror, fantasy, etc.) functions with the assumption that the reader will experience specific emotions or reactions as embodiments of those emotions with narrative or thematic adjustments that are negligible in the ultimate face of the emotive experience itself. Similarly, Warhol said that overly evocative contemporary media, such as soap operas, are technologies of affect. For this reason, disability might commonly be employed for the ease with which it evokes an emotional response. 

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