Representing Renaissance Queer Crips

• In Event: Styling Early Modern Disability

Abstract

This paper employs disability studies to show how Andrew Marvell’s poetry makes sense of human variation and bodily difference. I discuss Marvell’s representations of castration, impotency, and non-normative sexual physicality as they relate to Renaissance medical and cultural ideas about impairment and bodily difference. I posit that Marvell’s poem “Upon a Eunuch” can be read as a disability narrative, in which verse is imagined as an alternate means of sexual activity and access. For Marvell, poems are prosthetic objects that enable eunuchs to “procreate” in queer-crip ways. Examining Marvell’s poems as sexual prostheses illuminates intersections between sexuality/queer and disability studies. Reciprocities between queer and crip identities and theories have been noted in modernity, but sexual minorities and people with disabilities share a history of injustice and activist resistance to the prejudicial demand that corporeal “defects” be normalized. This talk thus invites conversations around early modern sexualized bodily difference and disability.

Author

• Allison Hobgood, Willamette University