Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-cfpbc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T23:08:59.763Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. W.W. Norton, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Egan, Jennifer. Manhattan Beach. Simon and Schuster, 2017.Google Scholar
Finger, Anne. Call Me Ahab. U of Nebraska P, 2009.Google Scholar
Finger, Anne. A Woman, in Bed. Cinco Puntas, 2018.Google Scholar
Fuderer, Laura Sue. The Female Bildungsroman in English: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. Modern Language Association, 1990.Google Scholar
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra, and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge, 1988.Google Scholar
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Oxford UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Longmore, Paul. Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity. Oxford UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New American Library, 1982.Google Scholar
Rapaport, Pola. “Pola Rapaport on ‘Story of O.‘” Interview by Steve Paulson. Wisconsin Public Radio, 25 Feb. 2007, archive.ttbook.org/listen/6165.Google Scholar
Réage, Pauline. The Story of O. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1954.Google Scholar
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. W.W. Norton, 1992.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, Tom, et al. The Sexual Politics of Disability. Cassell, 1996.Google Scholar
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Edited by Butler, Marilyn, Oxford UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Sittenfeld, Curtis. American Wife. Random House, 2008.Google Scholar
St. Jorre, John de. “The Unmasking of O”. The New Yorker, 1 Aug. 1994, pp. 42–50, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/08/01/the-unmasking-of-o.Google Scholar
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. W.W. Norton, 2010.Google Scholar
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. Oxford UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. New Directions, 1970.Google Scholar