Body Politics and Disability: Negotiating Subjectivity and Embodiment in Disability Poetry

The article explores the relation between the body and subjectivity through the lens of physical disability. Embarking from the idea that corporeality plays a crucial role in the way subjects are conceptualized, it emphasizes the potential of the non-normative body to produce a more flexible type of subjectivity. By focusing on poems on disability that are included in the collection Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2011), the aim in the article is to combine various representations of the disabled body with theories of subjectivity that reject unity, hierarchy, and order. For this purpose, the article employs the transgressive thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who developed a more extrovert and fluid conception of the subject compared to previous psychoanalytic theories. Notions of the Body without Organs, becoming, and desiring-machines are used to investigate the complex subject positions that emerge from disabled bodies and their interaction with their environment, as well as other bodies, both non-disabled and disabled. This understanding of the subject promotes a political stance that replaces hierarchal, ableist assumptions on embodiment with a more horizontal view of the body and its various manifestations.