Prosthesis Repurposed: Gender and Rehabilitation in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction

The article posits Flannery O'Connor's writing as an articulation of prosthesis's subversive potential. A crutch user, O'Connor wrote in the wake of World War II, as rehabilitation professionals sought not only to supply disabled people with sophisticated prostheses, but also to train them in their use. While the prescriptive instruction of the rehabilitation industry worked to reinstate normative productivity along gender lines, O'Connor's work illuminates technology's potential as a site for reimagining and reframing disabled embodiment. O'Connor's texts and characters attempt this repurposing through individual and subversive prosthesis use. Drawing primarily on her stories "Good Country People" and "The Lame Shall Enter First," the article considers how the use of prostheses to communicate unique predilections and desires challenges the standardizing impulse that undergirded postwar rehabilitation.