Reimagining Premodern Disability: Excess, Surplus, Gain
This panel puts forward premodern disability as enhancement, surplus, or even reward, drawing from the concept of “disability gain,” coined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Fox, Krings, Vierke, 2019), to reformulate disability as gain, instead of loss, or as a resource. The concept is based on H-Dirksen Bauman and Joseph Murray’s concept of “Deaf gain,” which approaches Deafness as a benefit that expands social, cultural, intellectual, and creative fields (2014). While this concept has yet to be applied to premodern disability, reading disability in premodern texts through the lens of “disability gain” may allow the modern scholar to reframe and discuss the premodern body outside of ethnocentric systems.