Making men sick: Disabled masculinities in women's literature

The male disabled character has been theorized in a variety of negative ways that reinforce the incongruity of masculinity and disability. However, this view has been formed by an almost exclusive focus on male-authored texts. Challenging assumptions about disability and masculinity created by this critical reliance on men's literature, I examine the gendered dynamics involved in women's representations of disabled men and identify alternative portrayals of disabled masculinity.;In the first chapter I argue for two feminist excursions into the analysis of disabled masculinity: greater attention to women's literature in theories about the male disabled character and a more generous incorporation of feminist-inflected masculinity studies into theories about disabled masculinity. In the subsequent chapters I identify two alternative treatments of disabled masculinity. In the reverse gender construction model, gender hierarchies that rely on an ability/disability binary are inverted, sometimes empowering female characters at the expense of the male disabled character, but at other times resulting in the confluence of disability and sexual desirability or in a fairly realistic portrait of disabled masculinity. Texts such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: The Royal Slave, Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God fit this model.;In the doubly emancipatory construction model, the portrayal of disabled male characters interrogates both gender and ability hierarchies. Examples include George Eliot's Mill on the Floss and Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, which make progress in normalizing disability within emerging definitions of masculinity or through social performance. Nancy Mairs in her autobiographies goes even further, suggesting that gender and ability roles can be detached from biology and repurposed as tools according to the needs of individual men.;In focusing on women's literature, I locate models of diverse masculinities that support the co-existence of disability; provide a more complete literary history of disabled masculinity and the rhetorical devices used to construct that identity; and speculate on the possibilities for social justice that come out of identifying a range of literary models for male embodiment.