Abstract

This article argues that Olive Moore’s 1930 novel Spleen investigates the appropriative relationship between experimental modernism and disability. While the text takes up the disabled aesthetics of broken statues and incapacitated narratives, it also dramatizes how modernists articulate their own exceptional capacity, mobility, and able-bodiedness in ways that reinforce eugenic understandings of disability. Specifically, Moore demonstrates how feminist and emerging queer politics in the inter-war period borrowed disabled aesthetic tropes in order to recast understandings of sexuality and gender through exceptionalism, but did so by reifying disability and race as supposedly immutable categories. This reading of Spleen, via disability studies and a detour into suffragist art vandalism, insists that modernist studies must address the legacy of appropriating disabled modes of perception and expression.

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