Disability and queer fiction

This essay traces the interconnections between disability and queerness in two early examples of the queer anglophone novel, namely: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). The literary analysis that follows explores how early twentieth-century authors like Hall and Capote differently approached depictions of sexual inversion in their fiction in ways that signalled the invert body as freighted with crip cultural meaning. In analysing the queer-crip bodies detailed by these writers under the banner of sexual inversion, this essay recovers textual moments of resistance, allegiance and generative transgression while also simultaneously holding space for the non-progressive, negative, even ugly literary history of queer fiction’s unspoken ableism. Examining the category of the sexual invert in literature affords us an opportunity to think through queer representation before the gay and disabled liberation movements of the late 1970s in the Global North. Moreover, it also presents a timely occasion to pull on the threads of the interwoven histories of pre-liberation queer and disabled bodies that persist into our own contemporary moment. In reading the status of disability in queer fiction, this essay argues that the sexually invert body brings into sharp relief the interwoven histories of literary homophobia and ableism as well as an ingress into the very cultural terrain upon which a crip-queer allegiance of resistance has been first imagined by disparate readers across time.