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Title |
Overshadowed by Ableism: Disabilities and "Bodies of Familial Shame" in Yuan Qiongqiong's Fiction from the Martial Law Period |
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Author |
Chi, Ta-Wei |
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Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University |
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Abstract |
This article identifies the disabilities shown in the texts of the first five story collections of Yuan Qiongqiong (1950-), all of which were published during the Martial Law Period. Inspired by the insights of emerging disability studies, the article urges the reader to recognize Yuan's contributions, habitually underestimated, to literal representations of disabilities. From these, the reader might scavenge images of disabilities visualized even prior to the promulgations of laws to secure the rights and dignities that people with disabilities deserve. As the term "disabilities," which connotates the awareness of disability rights, is both anachronistic and indispensable in discussions of Yuan's stories published in the 1970s and 1980s, the article strategically proposes "the bodies of familial shame," a notion to supplement rather than replace "disabilities." In the stories by Yuan discussed in the article, the plots often startle the reader not with the characters' physical or mental conditions but with reactions to the shame resulting from the ableist ideology among the disabled characters' families. For example, to protect themselves from the supposedly contagious shame associated with their disabled family members, seemingly able-bodied and able-minded characters might resort to verbal or physical abuse of their already suffering parents, spouses, siblings, or children. Therefore, even when family members are not apparently disabled, they are never free from ableism. Rather, they can simultaneously be both victims of and collaborators in this ableist ideology and are thus worthy of attention in literary disability studies. |
