(Un)natural Bodies: Reproduction, Disability, Queerness

Abstract

This dissertation arises from an interdisciplinary attention to the categories of embodiment, otherness, and the "abnormal." In deconstructing a "normal" versus "abnormal" binary, I focus specifically on establishing intersections between disabled and/or queer bodies, those commonly categorized as monstrous. By way of feminist science studies and cultural studies theoretical frameworks, I postulate that the connections between disabled and/or queer bodies can be read through the practices of biological, cultural, and queer reproduction(s). Chapter One is concerned with examining how disabled and/or queer physical reproduction highlights and troubles a heteronormative and able-bodied normative time line. I consider Michael Berube's memoir Life As We Know It and Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible in order to hypothesize a notion I term "queer-progress," a time line that works in opposition to a linear progressive movement of bodies in time. In Chapter Two, I investigate the process of cultural and social reproduction. What kinds of attitudes, beliefs, and storylines are perpetually recreated and reproduced around disabled and/or queer bodies? How is the disabled and/or queer body positioned against a "normal" body? I study Alice Munro's short story "Child's Play" and Lois Lowry's young adult novel The Giver with the aim to expose how socio-cultural reproductive policing technologies seek to maintain able-bodied and heteronormative privilege by way of the normalization and reproduction of negative affect towards monstrous bodies. Chapter Three analyzes texts that envision queer reproductive stories, both biological and cultural, for disabled and/or queer subjects. I examine the question of what happens when disabled and/or queer bodies bear reproductive fruit, both physically and in the form of cultural change. I explore Larissa Lai's novel Salt Fish Girl and Allyson Mitchell's art installation Ladies Sasquatch and posit that these texts offer alternative manifestations of reproduction, community, and kinship formations. This project places different dialogues in conversation with one another feminist thought about reproduction, disability and reproduction, queerness and reproduction, disability and queerness and how the "normal" body is created and maintained. In sum, I build on existing work in feminism, disability studies and queer theory to develop the notion of "reproduction" in an interdisciplinary fashion.