CFP: Reimagining Disability through “Disability Gain” (RSA Panel)

This panel welcomes contributions devoted to the long genealogy of literary, visual, and historical representations of the disabled or “defective” body, particularly those also attentive to the concept of “disability gain.” Coined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “disability gain,” allows Renaissance scholars to reconsider and reimagine the disabled body (​​Fox, Krings, Vierke, 2019). Through this framework, based on H-Dirksen Bauman and Joseph Murray’s concept of “Deaf gain,” which approaches Deafness as a benefit that expands social, cultural, intellectual, and creative fields, we may reconsider interpretations and depictions of the disabled body as a cipher for defect, for loss, vice, or sin (2014). While this concept has yet to be applied broadly to Renaissance disability, the lens of “disability gain” may allow the modern scholar to reframe and reconceptualize the premodern body and its various temporal, sociocultural, political, and linguistic proliferations. To this end, we ask scholars to question the designation of disabled bodies as lacking and instead posit the affordances open to premodern studies of the body when disability is reread or reimagined. We invite papers that engage with conceptions of disability as gain, rather than a lack or failure of signification. We are open to transhistorical, transnational and translingual, and comparative approaches, as well as to interdisciplinary work that dialogues with material understandings of the body, humanistic approaches, contemporary critical theory, and recent critical interventions in disability studies.