Crip / Early / Modern: The Sexual Politics Of Disability In English Renaissance Literature

This study inquires into the ways sick and disabled bodies bear a sexually politicized thrust within several dramatic and poetic works of the English Renaissance. I would like to add to the growing conversation concerning literary interpretations of disability by suggesting that disabled embodiment was often rationalized within early modern literature as a force of subversive sexual power—embodiment figured as not only improperly sexual but also, at times, hypersexual, threatening to the sociopolitical environments of the textual worlds I examine. To make this argument, I consider three Renaissance works—William Shakespeare’s problem-play All’s Well That Ends Well, Richard Barnfield’s pastoral poem The Affectionate Shepherd, and Thomas Heywood’s domestic tragedy A Woman Killed with Kindness. The social arenas depicted in these texts demand bodies to acquire able-bodiedness and, by consequence, sexual use-value and productivity, employing efforts of medicalization and social erasure to make this happy ending a happy reality.