Diaphanous Bodies by Jessica Colangelo

Diaphanous Bodies by Jessica Colangelo

Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature examines ability, as a category of embodiment and embodied experience, and in the process opens up a new area of inquiry in the growing field of literary disability studies. It argues that the construction of ability arises through a process of exclusion and forgetting, in which the depiction of sensory information and epistemological judgment subtly (or sometimes un-subtly) elide the fact of embodied subjectivity. The result is what Colangelo calls “the myth of the diaphanous abled body,” a fiction that holds that an abled body is one which does not participate in or situate experience. The diaphanous abled body underwrites the myth that abled and disabled constitute two distinct categories of being rather than points on a constantly shifting continuum.

In any system of marginalization, the dominant identity always sets itself up as epistemologically and experientially superior to whichever group it separates itself from. Indeed, the norm is always most powerful when it is understood as an empty category or a view from nowhere. Diaphanous Bodies explores the phantom body that underwrites the artificial dichotomy between abled and disabled, upon which the representation of embodied experience depends.

Honorable Mention: Modern Language Association (MLA) 2022 Prize for Independent Scholars

"His reconceptualization of ability and disability in terms of the body as diaphanous or a-diaphanous has become the intersection for the philosophical and theoretical discussions mentioned previouslyThe due attention paid to the human body in this book has managed to put the bodily weakness back into our notions of subjectivity and ableism as an integral part."

"Jeremy Colangelo's highly original study, Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature, represents an outstanding contribution to the burgeoning scholarship of disability studies and to both Irish and modernism studies...His argument is well-organized, clear, and persuasive, and his posture toward others working in the fields in which he engages is notably generous, not only toward the scholars with whom his work is in dialogue but also toward readers who may not have an extensive background in disability studies."

Jessica Colangelo is SSHRC Post-doctoral Fellow at SUNY Buffalo and Lecturer at King’s University College at The University of Western Ontario. She is the editor of Joyce Writing Disability.