Introduction: Disability in the Eighteenth Century

Disability studies emerged out of the rights-based activism of the 1970s and 1980s to become an interdisciplinary field invested in challenging stigmatizing notions of disability as individual impairment, pitiful tragedy, or human lack. Critical both to the disability civil rights movement and to the academic field is the social model of disability, which understands environments, institutions, cultures, and attitudes to be disabling, rather than locating those disabilities within individuals, who are then subject to curative intervention or even elimination. For disability scholars, the medical model's reduction of disability to pathology is symptomatic of a more pervasive cultural preference for able-bodiedness—what Tobin Siebers has called "the ideology of ability."¹ Foundational scholarship in disability studies, such as Lennard Davis's Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, have worked to historicize the ways in which able-bodiedness has been normalized through not only state policies and statistical thinking, but also literary and artistic production.² Since the late 1990s, literary and cultural disability studies have responded to the legacy of representations that depict disabled people as infirm, infantile, or inhuman. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder critique this deployment of disability as a crutch used to shore up narratives of progress or recovery.³ Disability, invoked only for its transgressive or symbolic potential through typically flat, minor characters, is then promptly cast away through curative resolution. The ubiquity and stereotypicality of these narratives, Mitchell and Snyder suggest, enable the normativizing of able-bodiedness. Disability thereby becomes "the master trope of human disqualification."⁴

The "tyranny of the norm" and disability as "the master trope of human disqualification" have become ur-narratives in disability scholarship. Yet, attention to historical periods prior to the development of what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has called the "normate"—a composite identity unmarked by bodily difference and defined by and against other bodies coded as "deviant" or "defective"—radically unsettles an otherwise deterministic model of disability as ever-moving toward oppression and pathology.⁵ As scholars like Helen Deutsch, Felicity Nussbaum, Chris Mounsey, and David Turner have demonstrated, disability as a concept was in flux and was frequently "subsumed under other categories, notably deformity and monstrosity" in the eighteenth century.⁶ Before the rise of the hard sciences and the professionalization of medicine, the eighteenth century witnessed intense debates over the definition of the human, a category which radically shifted how bodies were understood and ultimately valued. Embodied concepts of deformity and debility attached to race, gender, class, and sexuality preceded the eugenic thinking of the nineteenth century that reified the binary of normal and abnormal. Yet, during this transformative period, disabled people also survived, resisted, and even flourished. Scholarship in eighteenth-century studies, as exemplified by the essays in this cluster, has not only powerfully contributed to more historically nuanced interpretations of disability, but also to a larger shift toward more intersectional disability studies informed by other minority fields like queer studies and critical race studies.

The Disability Studies Caucus is a relatively young caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies compared to the Race and Empire Caucus and the Women's Caucus. Its beginnings can be traced back to 2004, when Lennard Davis and D. Christopher Gabbard organized a panel titled "Defect, Deformity, and Disfigurement in the Long Eighteenth Century." There would not be another panel on the topic of disability until 2011, when Chris Mounsey organized two panels under the title "Looking at Disability in the Eighteenth Century." These would be followed by collaborations with Stan Booth, George Haggerty, Paul Kelleher, Jared Richman, and Jason Farr that resulted in panels and roundtables like the "History of Disability (Studies)," "Eighteenth-Century Disability Studies: Past, Present, and Future," "Disability, War, and Violence," and "Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century." By 2014, the Disability Studies Caucus had become formally recognized by ASECS and has since held sessions on topics like crip theory, disability and aging, and crip approaches to eighteenth-century narratives.

The essays composing this...