Abstract
This thesis argues that disability and gender are co-constituents in the creation of the normative body in early modern England, and that the theatre and other performative and cultural spaces are ideal places to examine how and to what effect disability and gender intersect. Disability is a key component of femininity, and disability is effeminizing in early modern discourses. Understandings of disability were often gendered, and the performing and performative bodies of women, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people in a range of social and cultural contexts were understood as departing from the ableist, heteronormative, patriarchal norm, however extraordinary and hyper-able they were. I use critical models from both disability and feminist studies to analyse the representation of these bodies, including the social model of disability and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theorisation of intersectionality. Becoming and being a woman in early modern England was disabling, but this experience was not monolithic or universal. Instead, this disabling process was multivalently fluid and intersectional, shifting as different bodies interacted with the ableist, heteronormative, and misogynist social structures of patriarchy in different ways.This is a thesis of two halves. The first examines how gender and disability intersect in the staged drama of the period, while the second explores how they intersect in the performatively public roles of women of varying social rank and situation. Each chapter contextualizes moments where performative disability emerges within a wider narrative of gendered power structures. The first chapter argues that disability (specifically, the results of physical mutilation and disfigurement through traumatic injury) is an often overlooked but vital category of analysis in tragedy. Building on work by Margaret Owens and Kim Solga on staged representations of physical and sexual violence, I use early English-language tragedies (1550s-90s) to demonstrate how an elite female body must be forcibly disabled, silenced, and killed in order to rebuild the imperilled tragic state. The bodies of these elite women are reproduced on stage, and through death, not through pregnancy and childbirth. In contrast with these losses, Chapter Two uses the idea of ‘disability gain’, as articulated by H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray and developed by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, to demonstrate how comedic resolutions in late Elizabethan plays offer greater freedom and agency for both female and disabled characters. The second half of the thesis moves from the professional and elite stages of written drama to the performative spaces of the court and the scaffold. Chapter Three examines the performances of a range of extraordinary female bodies at the Marian and Elizabethan courts, from the queen’s fool to the queen herself. I explain how the intense reproductive pressures of dynastic ambition were in themselves disabling, and how these women employed various strategies of avoidance and compliance to negotiate these pressures. I use Alison Kafer’s notion of compulsory able-bodiedness to expose how ruling and reproduction were understood in terms of dis/ability and considered mutually exclusive in early modern society. Chapter Four interrogates the subject position of the disabled female martyr. Martyring an already disabled body exposes the ableist assumptions of a theology that renders female and disabled bodies as less ‘worthy’ of salvation.
| Date of Award | 1 Oct 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Lucy Munro (Supervisor) |