Disability and Contemporary Performance

Chapter 5

Encountering paralysis

Disability, trauma, and narrative

The experience of disability is often figured as a moment of rupture, as a tragic loss of certainty about bodily status, social and economic future. Popular culture provides us with endless images of disability as a narrative impetus, as reason to set a story in motion. The reliance of narrative on disability as driving force has been called ‘narrative prosthesis’ by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. This prosthesis doesn’t primarily create highly complex, differentiated images of disability as much as stories riven with their own status of incompleteness. They write:

This defining corporeal unruliness consistently produces characters who are indentured to their biological programming ...