Imagining a ‘gothic disability’: literary genre, political theory, and living disabled in Riva Lehrer’s portraiture

Abstract

Normative images of disability portray disabled people as ‘supercrips,’ victims, or symbols. These forms of representation, which oversimplify disability and demand narrative predictability, resemble ‘romantic’ norms of governance as described by Bonnie Honig. Offering an alternative, Honig translates the ‘female gothic’ literary genre into a ‘gothic subjectivity’ in which political subjects are ‘neither solely grateful nor perpetually disaffected’ within various ‘sites of belonging’ such as governing bodies, authority figures, and the self (Beltràn 2015, 102). I propose that disability is one such ‘site of belonging’ which would benefit from a gothic lens, as exemplified by Riva Lehrer’s portraiture. In contrast to the norm, a gothic imagining of disability celebrates disability without romanticizing it, presents disabled people as self-determined subjects rather than objects, and develops political significance without rhetorical exploitation. Thus, a ‘gothic disability’ may reject prescriptive narratives of ableism and facilitate the formation of a complex and liberatory disabled subjectivity.