Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences Department of American Culture and Literature DISABILITY AND FAMILY IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICAN DRAMA Duygu Beste BAŞER ÖZCAN Ph.D. Dissertation Ankara, 2023 DISABILITY AND FAMILY IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICAN DRAMA Duygu Beste BAŞER ÖZCAN Hacettepe University Graduate School of Social Sciences Department of American Culture and Literature Ph.D. Dissertation Ankara, 2023 KABUL VE ONAY Duygu Beste BAŞER ÖZCAN tarafından hazırlanan “Disability and Family in Twenty-First Century American Drama” başlıklı bu çalışma, 31/05/2023 tarihinde yapılan savunma sınavı sonucunda başarılı bulunarak jürimiz tarafından Doktora Tezi olarak kabul edilmiştir. Prof. Dr. Tanfer Emin TUNÇ (Başkan) Doç. Dr. S. Bilge MUTLUAY ÇETİNTAŞ (Danışman) Dr. Öğretim Üyesi Ceylan ÖZCAN (Üye) Dr. Öğretim Üyesi Selen AKTARİ SEVGİ (Üye) Dr. Öğretim Üyesi Nisa Harika GÜZEL KÖŞKER (Üye) Yukarıdaki imzaların adı geçen öğretim üyelerine ait olduğunu onaylarım. Prof.Dr. Uğur ÖMÜRGÖNÜLŞEN Enstitü Müdürü YAYIMLAMA VE FİKRİ MÜLKİYET HAKLARI BEYANI Enstitü tarafından onaylanan lisansüstü tezimin tamamını veya herhangi bir kısmını, basılı (kağıt) ve elektronik formatta arşivleme ve aşağıda verilen koşullarla kullanıma açma iznini Hacettepe Üniversitesine verdiğimi bildiririm. Bu izinle Üniversiteye verilen kullanım hakları dışındaki tüm fikri mülkiyet haklarım bende kalacak, tezimin tamamının ya da bir bölümünün gelecekteki çalışmalarda (makale, kitap, lisans ve patent vb.) kullanım hakları bana ait olacaktır. Tezin kendi orijinal çalışmam olduğunu, başkalarının haklarını ihlal etmediğimi ve tezimin tek yetkili sahibi olduğumu beyan ve taahhüt ederim. Tezimde yer alan telif hakkı bulunan ve sahiplerinden yazılı izin alınarak kullanılması zorunlu metinleri yazılı izin alınarak kullandığımı ve istenildiğinde suretlerini Üniversiteye teslim etmeyi taahhüt ederim. Yükseköğretim Kurulu tarafından yayınlanan “Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” kapsamında tezim aşağıda belirtilen koşullar haricince YÖK Ulusal Tez Merkezi / H.Ü. Kütüphaneleri Açık Erişim Sisteminde erişime açılır. o Enstitü / Fakülte yönetim kurulu kararı ile tezimin erişime açılması mezuniyet tarihimden itibaren 2 yıl ertelenmiştir. (1) o Enstitü / Fakülte yönetim kurulunun gerekçeli kararı ile tezimin erişime açılması mezuniyet tarihimden itibaren ….. ay ertelenmiştir. (2) o Tezimle ilgili gizlilik kararı verilmiştir. (3) ……/………/…… Duygu Beste BAŞER ÖZCAN “Lisansüstü Tezlerin Elektronik Ortamda Toplanması, Düzenlenmesi ve Erişime Açılmasına İlişkin Yönerge” (1) Madde 6. 1. Lisansüstü tezle ilgili patent başvurusu yapılması veya patent alma sürecinin devam etmesi durumunda, tez danışmanının önerisi ve enstitü anabilim dalının uygun görüşü üzerine enstitü veya fakülte yönetim kurulu iki yıl süre ile tezin erişime açılmasının ertelenmesine karar verebilir. (2) Madde 6. 2. Yeni teknik, materyal ve metotların kullanıldığı, henüz makaleye dönüşmemiş veya patent gibi yöntemlerle korunmamış ve internetten paylaşılması durumunda 3. şahıslara veya kurumlara haksız kazanç imkanı oluşturabilecek bilgi ve bulguları içeren tezler hakkında tez danışmanının önerisi ve enstitü anabilim dalının uygun görüşü üzerine enstitü veya fakülte yönetim kurulunun gerekçeli kararı ile altı ayı aşmamak üzere tezin erişime açılması engellenebilir. (3) Madde 7. 1. Ulusal çıkarları veya güvenliği ilgilendiren, emniyet, istihbarat, savunma ve güvenlik, sağlık vb. konulara ilişkin lisansüstü tezlerle ilgili gizlilik kararı, tezin yapıldığı kurum tarafından verilir *. Kurum ve kuruluşlarla yapılan işbirliği protokolü çerçevesinde hazırlanan lisansüstü tezlere ilişkin gizlilik kararı ise, ilgili kurum ve kuruluşun önerisi ile enstitü veya fakültenin uygun görüşü üzerine üniversite yönetim kurulu tarafından verilir. Gizlilik kararı verilen tezler Yükseköğretim Kuruluna bildirilir. Madde 7.2. Gizlilik kararı verilen tezler gizlilik süresince enstitü veya fakülte tarafından gizlilik kuralları çerçevesinde muhafaza edilir, gizlilik kararının kaldırılması halinde Tez Otomasyon Sistemine yüklenir. * Tez danışmanının önerisi ve enstitü anabilim dalının uygun görüşü üzerine enstitü veya fakülte yönetim kurulu tarafından karar verilir. ETİK BEYAN Bu çalışmadaki bütün bilgi ve belgeleri akademik kurallar çerçevesinde elde ettiğimi, görsel, işitsel ve yazılı tüm bilgi ve sonuçları bilimsel ahlak kurallarına uygun olarak sunduğumu, kullandığım verilerde herhangi bir tahrifat yapmadığımı, yararlandığım kaynaklara bilimsel normlara uygun olarak atıfta bulunduğumu, tezimin kaynak gösterilen durumlar dışında özgün olduğunu, Doç. Dr. S. Bilge MUTLUAY ÇETİNTAŞ danışmanlığında tarafımdan üretildiğini ve Hacettepe Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Tez Yazım Yönergesine göre yazıldığını beyan ederim. __/__/____ Duygu Beste BAŞER ÖZCAN iv To my father and To the strong women of my family who inspire and encourage me v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my gratitude to my advisor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş for her guidance and encouragement throughout the writing process of this dissertation. I am deeply grateful to my dissertation committee and jury members, Prof. Dr. Tanfer Emin Tunç, Assist. Prof. Dr. Ceylan Özcan, Assist. Prof. Dr. Selen Aktari Sevgi, and Assist. Prof. Dr. Nisa Harika Güzel Köşker for their valuable contributions and discerning feedback, which have significantly enriched the depth of my research. My heartfelt appreciation goes out to the members of the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University. My professors, colleagues, and friends provided a nurturing environment, akin to a family, and contributed to my professional development. Another special mention goes to the Turkish Fulbright Commission for sponsoring my research at the University of Michigan. I was fortunate to attend the classes and workshops led by Prof. Petra Kuppers, whose insights have shaped my research in profound ways. I am also indebted to Prof. Ann Fox for her meticulous readings and thought-provoking questions. Furthermore, I extend my appreciation to the New York Public Library and the Roundabout Theater for opening their archives and granting me access to invaluable resources. I am also grateful to my lifelong friends, Burcu, Ezgi, Ceren, Fatma, Tarık, Gül, Güray, Burak, Eda, Simla, and Burcu, for all the laughter and shared anxiety spanning to decades now. To all those mentioned above, and to the countless others who have encouraged me, I offer my heartfelt thanks. I will forever cherish their kindness. Finally, my loving family deserves more credit than what I can express here. Their unwavering support, encouragement, and belief in me have been a constant source of strength throughout this arduous journey. They have stood by me during the most challenging moments of my life. Thank you, for always being there for me. vi ABSTRACT BAŞER ÖZCAN, Duygu Beste. Disability and Family in Twenty-First Century American Drama, PhD Dissertation, Ankara, 2023. This dissertation analyzes John Belluso’s Pyretown (2005), The Rules of Charity (2006), A Nervous Smile (2006), David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People (2011), Stephan Karam’s The Humans (2015), Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living (2018), Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane (2018), and Lindsey Ferrentino’s Amy and the Orphans (2019) and scrutinizes the ways contemporary American playwrights employ disability in relation to the myth of the flawless American family. The representation of disability on the American stage has always been a complicated one as disabled bodies were either used as metaphors or presented as freaks, victims, and villains. The plays examined in this dissertation, however, negotiate disability as a multifaceted experience. They portray family dynamics that changed in the twenty-first century while dissociating disability from stereotypical meanings. The playwrights dramatize the lived experience of disability, and they problematize ideologies that ostracize, pathologize, and oppress disabled individuals to initiate social, cultural, and political transformation in the United States. Since they criticize dehumanizing and exploitative social and political institutions using realism and the affective power of theater, these plays are referred to as the social problem plays of the twenty-first century. Each chapter exposes oppressive power relations and portrays the lived experience of disabled individuals without romanticizing or objectifying their bodies. Neoliberalism, class, problems in the healthcare and welfare systems, and the cult of normalcy are presented as the forces that put the family in a dysfunctional state whereas disability is depicted as a social, cultural, and political construction. Therefore, these plays are progressive and subversive with their truthful depictions of families with disabled members, showing that the problem is not disability but constructed normalcy, which forces families and individuals to conform to rigid definitions. Keywords: American Drama, American Theater, Contemporary Playwrights, Disability Culture, Disability Studies, Family vii ÖZET BAŞER ÖZCAN, Duygu Beste. 21. Yüzyıl Amerikan Tiyatrosunda Engelli Bireyler ve Aile Kavramı, Doktora Tezi, Ankara, 2023. Bu tez John Belluso’nun Pyretown (2005), The Rules of Charity (2006), A Nervous Smile (2006), David Lindsay-Abaire’in Good People (2011), Stephan Karam’ın The Humans (2015), Martyna Majok’un Cost of Living (2018), Amy Herzog’un Mary Jane (2018), ve Lindsey Ferrentino’nun Amy and the Orphans (2019) adlı oyunlarında engelliliğin nasıl tasvir edildiğini kusursuz Amerikan ailesi söylencesi bağlamında inceler. Amerikan tiyatrosunda engelli karakterler her zaman kötü, mağdur ya da anormal olarak tanımlandığından engelli bireylerin tasviri her zaman sorunlu olmuştur. Bu tezde incelenen oyunlar ise engelliliği çok yönlü bir deneyim olarak mecazi anlamların dışında gerçekçi bir şekilde ele alırken, 21. yüzyılda değişen aile dinamiklerini de ortaya koyar. Bu bağlamda, yazarlar gerçek engellilik deneyimini sahnelerken engelli bireyleri ötekileştiren, patolojik vakalar olarak tanımlayan ve onları baskılayan sosyal, kültürel ve politik söylemleri hedef alır. Bu oyunlar realizmi (gerçekçilik) ve tiyatronun dönüştürücü gücünü kullanarak engelli bireyleri itibarsızlaştıran ve onları istismar eden sosyal ve kültürel kuralları hedef gösterdikleri için 21. yüzyılın problem oyunları olarak tanımlanabilir. Bu çerçevede, tezin bölümlerinde baskıcı politikalar incelenirken, engelli bireyler de nesneleştirilmeden gerçek ve günlük hayat deneyimlerine dayanarak tanımlanır. Neoliberal politikalar, sınıfsal problemler, sağlık ve sosyal yardım sistemlerindeki sıkıntılar ve normal olmaya zorlanmanın aileleri işlevsizleştirmesi konu alınırken engelliliğin de sosyal ve kültürel olarak inşa edilen bir kimlik olduğu gösterilir. Bu nedenle, bu oyunlar tabuları ve baskıcı kuralları yıkan ilerici ve yenilikçi oyunlardır. Bu oyunların da gösterdiği gibi, ailelerin yaşadıkları problemlerin sebebi engelli aile bireyleri değil aileleri ve bireyleri kısıtlı tanımlarla nitelemeye çalışan ve sözde normal kavramına uymaya zorlayan toplumsal ve kültürel yapılardır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Aile, Amerikan Oyunları, Amerikan Tiyatrosu, Çağdaş Oyun Yazarları, Engelli Kültürü, Engellilik Çalışmaları TABLE OF CONTENTS ACCEPTANCE AND APPROVAL ............................................................................... i YAYIMLAMA VE FİKRİ MÜLKİYET HAKLARI BEYANI.................................. ii ETİK BEYAN ................................................................................................................. iii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................ iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................. v ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................... vi TURKISH ABSTRACT ............................................................................................... vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: JUGGLING IT ALL: SINGLE MOTHERS, DISABLED CHILDREN, AND DISAFFECTION ......................................................................... 36 1.1. JOHN BELLUSO’S PYRETOWN ............................................................ 39 1.2. AMY HERZOG’S MARY JANE .............................................................. 59 1.3. DAVID LINDSAY ABAIRE’S GOOD PEOPLE .................................... 74 1.4. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................... 86 CHAPTER 2: TOGETHER WE THRIVE, DIVIDED WE SUFFER: ACCESS INTIMACY AND AFFECTIVE CONNECTION ..................................................... 89 2.1. JOHN BELLUSO’S THE RULES OF CHARITY ................................... 94 2.2. STEPHEN KARAM’S THE HUMANS ................................................. 108 2.3. MARTYNA MAJOK’S COST OF LIVING ........................................... 126 2.4. CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 143 CHAPTER 3: “WE CAN’T KEEP HER:” ABJECTION AS AN AFFECTIVE RESPONSE .................................................................................................................. 146 3.1. JOHN BELLUSO’S A NERVOUS SMILE ............................................ 150 3.2. LINDSEY FERRENTINO’S AMY AND THE ORPHANS .................. 164 3.3. CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 180 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................ 182 WORKS CITED .......................................................................................................... 194 ix APPENDIX 1. ORIGINALITY REPORT ................................................................ 202 APPENDIX 2. ETHICS BOARD WAIVER FORM ............................................... 204 1 INTRODUCTION The history of disability is marked by constant negotiations between dichotomies such as dependence-independence, inclusion-exclusion, normal-abnormal, ordinary- extraordinary, visible-invisible or activism-passivism. Just like the meanings attributed to gender, ethnicity, race and class, the interpretation of disability is also determined by sociopolitical apparatuses and practices. Disability history provides insight into the history of human identity. It shows, as Ann. M. Fox argues, “how the tyranny of normalcy really works to regulate all bodies” (“Reclaiming” 129). In Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, Lennard J. Davis discusses the impact of social and cultural practices in defining disability. He argues that disability is “a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking about the body under certain historical circumstances” (2). Likewise, Rosemarie Garland Thomson argues in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature that disability should be analyzed “in the context of social power relations” because it is created through “legal, medical, political, cultural, and literary narratives” (6). Since these power relations are subject to change depending on the political, social, or cultural circumstances, the definition of disability also changes. In Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder give some examples of such power relations and the changes they enforce. They state that “the Victorian equation between femininity and hysteria; the biological racism that justified slavery and the social subordination of racial minorities; psychiatry’s categorization of homosexuality as a pathological disorder” exemplify the obsession with “normalizing” bodies (2). Although these practices were common and supported in the past, they are unacceptable in today’s understanding of normalcy. Therefore, a person who is disabled may no longer be associated with this category, or a person who is identified as “able-bodied” or “normal” can later be categorized as disabled. Garland Thomson claims that disability is an umbrella term that “encompasses congenital and acquired physical differences, mental illness and retardation, chronic and acute illnesses, fatal and progressive diseases, temporary and permanent injuries, and a wide range of bodily characteristics considered disfiguring, such as scars, birthmarks, 2 unusual proportions, or obesity” (Extraordinary 13). Davis also refers to disability as an unstable category as follows: The category “disability” begins to break down when one scrutinizes who make up the disabled. The obvious cases are seen by most observers as disabled: the blind, the deaf, people using wheelchairs, prostheses, and so on. But when we include learning impairments, dyslexia, obesity, and then compound those categories with disease-generated disabilities—AIDS, tuberculosis, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic illnesses—the instability of the category “disabled” begins to appear. The fact is that most citizens will have some level of impairment, some degree of physical difference from others. Most humans, as they age, will find themselves less able to see, hear, or think so well as they did before. (xv) As the quote suggests, the boundaries of the two inseparable concepts, normalcy and disability, are vague. This ambiguity allows societies to alter the standards of normalcy to legitimize the politics that regulate bodies and identities. Always forcing normalization, these standards are embedded in cultural and social practices. American history demonstrates that those who cannot be reformed have traditionally been excluded from the public sphere, stigmatized, or have become invisible members of society. This dissertation will analyze contemporary approaches to disability and normalcy to illustrate recent policies toward disabled individuals. By scrutinizing eight contemporary plays written by six playwrights, this dissertation will expose the power relations that govern the bodies of American citizens. Since the disabled body has always been a spectacle for Americans, theater is instrumental in displaying varying perceptions of “abnormal” bodies as well as oppressive body politics. Therefore, this study focuses on twenty-first century American drama and claims that the works which will be analyzed problematize the notion of disability. That is, they make use of realism to reveal a social and cultural wound that lies in the heart of American society. Therefore, they can be categorized as the social problem plays of the twenty-first century. To better understand contemporary approaches to disability representation and normalcy, it is necessary to examine meanings ascribed to physical and cognitive differences throughout American history. This will shed light on the practices of normalization and the changing attitudes toward disability, which have shaped today’s perceptions. 3 When the treatment of people with impairments and disabilities is traced back to pre- colonial times, the concept of disability—as it is defined today—did not exist among indigenous communities. In A Disability History of the United States, disability historian Kim E. Nielsen states that indigenous people believed each person contributed to the community in different ways. Therefore, a person would have been considered “disabled” only when s/he could not contribute to reciprocal relationships in the community (3). Clearly, the invasion of Europeans brought diseases and death to indigenous communities, and also altered the perception of disability with their own definitions of wellness (Nielsen 11). In the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, European colonists focused on the ability to labor and earn one’s living; therefore, they tended to stigmatize people with cognitive disabilities “because of their general inability to provide for their own financial support” rather than those with physical disabilities (Nielsen 22). In other words, “the legal and economic condition of one’s family and community shaped definitions, experiences, and consequences of disability” prior to the American Revolution (Nielsen 48). The revolution changed society, as colonists now resolved to define citizenship as part of national identity. Decision makers concurred on the idea that the perfect American citizen was white, able-bodied, middle and upper class, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, cisgendered, heterosexual and male. The rationale behind the exclusion of the disabled body from this definition can be explained by Michel Foucault’s argument on controlling bodies in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault suggests that in the classical age, the body became the target to exert control and discipline so it becomes a docile body “that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved” (136). He states that What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A “political anatomy,” which was also a “mechanics of power,” was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, “docile” bodies. (138)1 1 It should be noted that Foucault does not use the term power as synonymous with political oppression. In The History of Sexuality, he explains that power “comes from everywhere….[It] 4 It is clear that Foucault associates disciplining the body with ruling power practices prevailing in society, an idea that he develops further through concepts such as the medical gaze, biopower, and the scientific categorization of human beings in The Birth of the Clinic. Accordingly, disability and normalcy, as categories, occupied a prominent place in the debates of eligible citizens in the United States since the leaders believed that they could build a nation only with “docile” bodies. In this process, a disabled body did not have much to contribute to the country since, they believed, it could not be improved or transformed. Consequently, just like with women and people of color, states did not grant disabled people the basic rights of citizenship, including suffrage: “Inherent to the creation of the United States was the legal and ideological delineation of those who embodied ableness and thus full citizenship, as apart from those whose bodies and minds were considered deficient and defective” (Nielsen 49-50). These ideas shaped how the body was perceived in the nineteenth century. Referring to Emerson’s ideas, Garland Thomson also states that the “American Ideal” of the nineteenth century constituted “self-government, self-determination, autonomy, and progress” (Extraordinary 42). The disabled body, therefore, was associated with nonconformity as it represented “the self gone out of control, individualism run rampant” (Extraordinary 43). Having control over one’s body, mind, and destiny defined American identity and it was required for being a full-fledged citizen. The discussions on individualism and the ideal American led to the exclusion and institutionalization of disability. Following the foundation of the first disability-specific institution in 1817, the American Asylum for the Deaf, the institutionalization of disability gained momentum between the end of the Civil War and the 1890s. Nielsen explains this phase as follows: [T]he creation of institutions and the increasing regulation that accompanied them further defined the normal and the abnormal, ableness and disability. White citizens considered insane, idiotic, or unable to support themselves economically due to physical difference were increasingly institutionalized, and voting restrictions based on justifications of mental inadequacy expanded. States and the federal government began to strengthen immigration laws that restricted entrance is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society” (93). Here, power is a part of everyday life as it is exerted through politics, culture, social rules and practices. 5 to those considered disabled. . . . Those whose bodies or minds were believed to be beyond redemption were variably warehoused or removed. (51) These practices continued for decades until they were challenged by the activists of the Disability Rights Movement, which gained momentum after the Civil Rights Movement. In addition to the American ideals of individualism and independence, growing industrialization, capitalism, and scientific developments of the nineteenth century transformed “the impaired” to “the disabled” because those with physical disabilities were unable to become a part of the productive economy (Davis 73-74). The evolution of the concept of work that came with industrialization altered the definition of a worker. An “able-bodied worker” was to operate machines, which in return disabled their bodies (Davis 87). The system that disabled workers did not assign them new roles and positions. Rather, they were compelled to withdraw from the workforce and the public space. When the problems caused by industrialization and urbanization became the main concern, policy makers, religious leaders and educators resorted to science for solutions. They used Gregor Mendel’s studies on genetics, Francis Galton’s tracts on eugenics, and the Binet-Simon intelligence test (a forerunner to the modern IQ test), among other (pseudo)scientific works, to claim that “criminality, feeble-mindedness, sexual perversions, and immorality, as well as leadership, responsibility, and proper expressions of gender, were hereditary traits” (Nielsen 101). Moreover, Darwin’s evolutionary theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest were applied to those with disabilities (through Social Darwinism), who were positioned as “evolutionary defectives to be surpassed by natural selection” (Davis 31). Statistics also shaped the way normalcy and disability were perceived in the early nineteenth century to explain and categorize health and disease. As a result, the concept of “average” was applied to the human body and the “average body” became “the desired” and “the ideal” (Davis 27). Statistics were used to justify dividing people into categories like standard/nonstandard and norm/non-norm, forcing the nonstandard to become a part of the norm (Davis 30). This idea of “normalizing” “defective” populations would become a cornerstone of both American eugenics and the biomedical model of disability. Members of the American Eugenics Movement argued that selective breeding practices would eradicate undesired hereditary traits. They believed the elimination of defectives 6 was necessary to homogenize and normalize societies. With a desire to reestablish the social order after the Civil War and Reconstruction, they drew on Galton’s theories to boost reproduction among “fit” (healthy, middle and upper class, heterosexual, cisgendered WASP) Americans (positive eugenics) and deter it among the “unfit” (everyone else). The latter (negative eugenics) led to the social stigmatization of disability as bodies were monitored by scientists and members of the medical profession. Those considered unfit were either contained in institutions or their genetic pool was terminated through forced sterilization. Nielsen explains the pathologization of disability, through such eugenic policies, as follows: Beginning in Indiana in 1907, more than thirty states passed forced-sterilization laws. . . . The model law developed by Harry Laughlin defined “socially inadequate classes” of people very broadly: “(I) Feebleminded; (2) Insane, (including the psychopathic); (3) Criminalistic (including the delinquent and wayward); (4) Epileptic; (5) Inebriate (including drug habitués); (6) Diseased (including the tuberculous, the syphilitic, the leprous, and others with chronic, infectious and legally segregable diseases); (7) Blind (including those with seriously impaired vision); (8) Deaf (including those with seriously impaired hearing); (9) Deformed (including the crippled); and (10) Dependent (including orphans, ne’er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers).” All state sterilization laws passed prior to 1921, and many after, applied to individuals diagnosed as sexual perverts. Because definitions of insanity included same-sex contact, the laws sometimes doubly impacted gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. And while sterilization laws were never sex-specific, more women than men were sterilized (despite the greater ease of sterilizing men). (115) Freak shows, which became popular in the Jacksonian Era and continued through the Progressive Era, provided eugenicists a site for observation to find proof for their arguments. The shows exhibited bodies that were excluded from the category of “normal” and such individuals became public spectacles. Freak shows are essential to disability history because they reinforced the medical approach to disability and urged American society to draw a clear line between “us” (fit) and “them” (the unfit).2 As Leslie Fiedler explains in his book Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, freak shows were therapeutic and cathartic since they reinforced the distinction between the normal and the freak (31). Among freakish bodies which were exhibited were “armless wonders, legless wonders, conjoint twins, and humans considered unnaturally large and 2 Tom Shakespeare defines the medical model of disability in his article entitled “The Social Model of Disability” as an approach “which seek[s] to count the numbers of people with impairment, or which reduce[s] the complex problems of disabled people to issues of medical prevention, cure, or rehabilitation” (197). 7 unnaturally small” (Nielsen 90).3 Fiedler also points out that plenty of words have been used synonymously with “freak” to highlight the differences: “oddities, malformations, abnormalities, anomalies, mutants, mistakes of nature, monsters, monstrosities, sports, ‘strange people,’ ‘very special people,’ and phenoménes” (Freaks 16). These terms demonstrate to what extent people were terrorized by the encounter with “the deviant” which “challenges the conventional boundaries between male and female, sexed and sexless, animal and human, large and small, self and other, and consequently between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth” (Fiedler, Freaks 24). Freak shows also portray the intersection of disability with class, race and gender. In addition to the bodies which were considered abnormal, physically normal natives and people of color were also exhibited at freak shows as “missing links between humans and animals” (Nielsen 90). Davis also points out the fact that the “freaks” selected to be exhibited belonged mostly to the lower classes (92). Ostracizing and stigmatizing anyone who did not conform to WASP standards of body, beauty and race, freak shows reinforced the dominant ideology of the century and shaped the way human anomaly was perceived. According to Garland Thomson, freak shows influenced public opinion because they challenged audiences not only to classify and explain what they saw, but to relate the performance to themselves, to American individual and collective identity. With bearded ladies, for example, Barnum and his followers demanded that American audiences resolve this affront to the rigid categories of male and female that their culture imposed. With Eng and Chang, the famous “Siamese” twins, the freak show challenged the boundaries of the individual, asking whether this entity was one person or two. With dwarfs as well as armless and legless “wonders,” the pitchmen charged their audiences to determine the precise parameters of human wholeness and the limits of free agency. (Extraordinary 60) Matching such adjectives as “wild” and “wondrous” with noble titles like “Queen,” “King,” or “General,” freak shows attracted great public attention and interest from eugenicists looking for subject matter. Moreover, advertisements and posters helped arouse their curiosity with hyperbolic remarks such as “What is It?” or “The Most Marvelous Creature Living” (Garland Thomson, Extraordinary 61). By presenting bodies with physical disabilities as grotesque figures and freaks, these shows exposed 3 For a detailed analysis of the bodies exhibited at freak shows, see Leslie Fiedler’s Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. 8 disabled people to the public gaze, stripped them of their humanity, and rendered them social oddities and medical objects ripe for clinical case studies. As the embodiment of idleness, immobility, and passivity, the freak became the antithesis of a “normal” American citizen, thereby reinforcing the physical and social hierarchy in American society (Garland Thomson, Extraordinary 65). By the 1940s, the extraordinary body had already attracted the attention of the medical professionals and the “freaks” of the nineteenth century became “the disabled” in medical discourse (Garland Thomson, Extraordinary 58). Garland Thomson argues that although the medical model of disability has dissociated disability from meanings such as evil and dangerous, it has pathologized disability and brought forth “deviance, patronizing relationships, and issues of control” (Extraordinary 37). She claims that the medical model of disability justified white supremacy, colonialism, eugenics, compulsory institutionalization, and sterilization practices. Moreover, the extraordinary which was once an object of the social gaze, changed position and became cases taught in medical schools (the medical gaze) (Extraordinary 78; Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic). Although the Eugenics Movement and practices such as sterilization have been abandoned, the medical model still defines disability as an anomaly that needs to be treated, corrected, normalized, and eliminated. Constant stigmatization and discrimination urged people with disabilities to form alliances. Nielsen suggests that disability organizations, established during the Great Depression Era and active during the Cold War period (e.g., Franklin D. Roosevelt’s March of Dimes, which focused on polio disability), helped future disability rights activists as they attempted to draw society’s attention to the “connections between disability, race, and sex discrimination” (133).4 In 1940, the first cross-disability organization, the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), was founded by Paul Strachan and worked for disabled people’s social rights such as employment and education (Nielsen 150). The organization was active during World War II when people with disabilities were both encouraged to enter the workforce to meet labor needs but forced out of the system at the same time. Nielsen argues that the activism of the AFPH and labor unions which insisted on the necessity for policies that 4 Cross disability organizations are for a variety of disability categories rather than for one such as the deaf or blind. 9 guaranteed secure wage employment intersected and they were inseparable. She notes that these groups “argued against medical rehabilitation and needs-based charity services that focused exclusively on altering the individual, rather than altering social and employer attitudes” (152). Despite these efforts, Nielsen states, federal policies and programs continued to be dominated by a medical-based approach to disability (153). After World War II, with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, people with disabilities and disability organizations increasingly argued against ableist attitudes in society and politics. They outspokenly rejected ideologies that categorized disabled people as deficient. Activists demanded “citizenship rights and participation, contested their incarceration in institutions, and [drew] attention to the exclusion and discrimination they encounter in daily life” (Sabatello 14). Rejection of the medical approach to disability also marks the birth of the social model of disability, which urged, as Shakespeare puts forward, “social explanations of disability.”5 Drawing attention to “social oppression, cultural discourse and environmental barriers,” the social model also contributed to the Disability Rights Movement (195-196). Since the social model argued for “barrier removal, anti-discrimination legislation, [and] independent living,” it was considered to be progressive by the advocates of disability rights whereas the medical model was perceived as reactionary (Shakespeare 198). The goals of the Disability Rights Movement which gained momentum in the following decades can be summarized as follows: The disability rights movement was energized by, overlapping with, and similar to other civil rights movements across the nation, as people with disabilities experienced the 1960s, and 1970s as a time of excitement, organizational strength, and identity exploration. Like feminists, African Americans, and gay and lesbian activists, people with disabilities insisted that their bodies did not render them defective. Indeed, their bodies could even be sources of political, sexual, and artistic strength. (Nielsen 160) Bringing social aspects of the disability experience to the forefront, the Disability Rights Movement activists and the social model defined disability as a social construction that stigmatizes and ostracizes people with disabilities, resulting in such 5 In addition, Paul K. Longmore explains in his introduction to Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability that the social model of disability is the equivalent of the minority group model of disability, both of which “shift the focus from individuals and pathologies to institutions and ideologies” (2). 10 problems as economic downfall and isolation. Moreover, they criticized paternalistic approaches to disability as well as the constructed hierarchies among different disabilities (Nielsen 162). As Shakespeare points out, the proponents of the social model argue that disabled people are also an oppressed group, and they redefine disability highlighting the distinction between disability and impairment. For them, impairments do not prevent people from participating in the public sphere. It is the physical, social, cultural, and political barriers that push people with impairments to the edges of society. According to the social model, impairment is “individual and private” whereas disability is “structural and public” (197). The Disability Rights Movement gave way to the Independent Living Movement whose advocates worked against the institutionalization of disabled people and believed that it was essential to remove any physical barrier to ensure “civic participation” of people with disabilities (Nielsen 163). Paul Longmore explains that the supporters of the Independent Living Movement sought legal protection from discrimination; the right to receive quality treatment or services; the right to refuse such treatment or services; due process in all professional or governmental decision making that affects them; equal access to public transportation and accommodations; and most central to the ILM’s objectives, the rights to deinstitutionalization and support services for independent living. (“Disability Rights” 112-113) Deinstitutionalization efforts benefited those who were lucky or privileged as they “found support in independent-living centers, community-based mental health centers, or in community-based group homes.” Most disabled people–especially Vietnam veterans–became homeless or ended up in prisons in the 1970s (Nielsen 164). Three important legislations of the late 1960s and 70s were the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1975. The Architectural Barriers Act required all future public buildings to be physically accessible for everyone whereas it excluded public transportation, recreational facilities, or other private commercial places. The Rehabilitation Act prohibited discrimination in employment and guaranteed that disabled individuals would not be discriminated in any program or activity funded by the Federal Government. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act made public education accessible to children with disabilities (Nielsen 165-170). 11 As Nielsen suggests, these regulations created a disability culture: “Building on the works of early generations, poets, visual artists, novelists, playwrights, and scholars forced a redefinition of culture and created new spaces of welcome and community” (179). Together with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they also set the stage for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, which “prohibits employment, access, housing, and educational discrimination against people with disabilities” (181). The social model of disability proved insufficient with the arrival of a new century and activists, along with academics, agreed on the need for a new approach to disability in order to understand its complexities better. In their 2006 book, Cultural Locations of Disability, Mitchell and Snyder proposed the cultural model of disability. Critics claim that unlike the social model, the cultural model does not draw a distinct line between disability as a biological reality and a social construction. Instead, they argue that biological reality and social ideologies intersect (7). For the cultural model, disability is more than an abnormality and it serves as “a tool of cultural diagnosis” to understand “how formulas of abnormality develop and serve to discount entire populations as biologically inferior” (12). This dissertation also aims to “diagnose” cultural interpretations of disability using the cultural model because despite activism and scholarly studies, most people with disabilities are still stigmatized and suffer from estrangement. In their introduction to The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, Mitchell and Snyder state that differences, whether physical or cognitive, are associated with “incapacity, special needs accommodations, and statistical deviance.” Moreover, they underscore that although class, race, gender, and sexuality are incorporated into the discussions on body, disability, which is also part of intersectionality, is often neglected (5). Therefore, issues such as stigma, normalcy, and disability should be addressed more extensively in academic works and discussions, especially in the humanities.6 6Mitchell and Snyder list some of the important academic works in disability studies as follows: Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body by Lennard Davis, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics by Arthur Frank, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840—1940 by Diane Price Herndl, The Creatures That Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Image by David Hevey, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Disability in the Movies by Martin Norden, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature by Rosemarie Garland Thomson and 12 Mitchell and Snyder reiterate the definition of disability recognized by the ADA as follows “(1) the impairment of a major life function, (2) an official diagnostic record that identifies a history of an individual’s impairment; and (3) a trait or characteristic that results in the stigmatization of the individual as limited or incapacitated” (The Body 2). They refer to disability as a deviation from what is considered normal in terms of a person’s mental, physical, or psychological condition and define a disabled person as “the objects of institutionalized discourses” (The Body 2-3). In order to understand how disabled bodies are perceived, regulated and controlled by societies throughout history, Davis suggests, it is important to discuss the concept of the norm and the perception of a normal body (23). He emphasizes the fact that the words “normal,” “normality,” and “normalcy” entered the English language in the mid-nineteenth century when social stigmatization of disability started with the rise of industrialization (24). In the same vein, Foucault analyzes the concept of normalcy and its relation to power. He argues that “the normal” is the result of coercive standardization attempts (i.e., the disciplining and punishment of abnormal bodies and behaviors) in education, medicine, industry, and other social institutions (Discipline 184). That is, while attempting to eradicate differences and homogenize societies, normalization becomes the main instrument of exerting power. As the human mind tends to think in binaries, “deviations” and “extremes” have been regarded as opposing terms of normal. If an able-bodied person is to be accepted as normal, a disabled body is considered a deviation from the norm (Davis 29). However, this is a superficial categorization because “such culturally generated and perpetuated standards as ‘beauty,’ ‘independence,’ ‘fitness,’ ‘competence,’ and ‘normalcy’ exclude and disable many human bodies while validating and affirming others” (Garland Thomson, Extraordinary 7). Mitchell and Snyder also interpret the norm as “an idealized quantitative and qualitative measure that is divorced from (rather than derived from) the observation of bodies, which are inherently variable” (Narrative 7). Garland Thomson contributes to the discussion on normalcy with her own definition. She coins the term “normate” and defines it as someone whose identity is socially and culturally constructed: “The term normate usefully designates the social figure through Prosthesis by David Wills (The Body, 9). Some of these critical works, which are related to the scope of this study, will be referenced throughout this dissertation. 13 which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings. Normate, then, is the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (Extraordinary 8). Moreover, the normate, or the dominant group, Garland Thomson argues, becomes the authority “to determine which differences are inferior” and therefore “legitimizes the status quo” (Extraordinary 31). Davis suggests that disability is constructed based on two criteria—function and appearance. According to the functional model, disability is perceived as an “inability to do something” and it is related to the capacity to move, see, or hear (11). Appearance, on the other hand, is directly related to stigma, a term coined by Erving Goffman in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Goffman defines the term as “an attribute that’s deeply discrediting” (13) and as “an undesired differentness” (15). According to Goffman, individuals are stigmatized according to three characteristics: First there are abominations of the body—the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behaviour. Finally there are the tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family. (14) Individuals who are outside of this categorization, Goffman states, are considered as “the normal” who live up to the standards of a society: “We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normals” (15). Drawing on Goffman’s theory, Davis states that the person with a disability is stigmatized and becomes the object of the gaze, which results in varying degrees of emotional responses such as “horror, fear, pity, compassion, and avoidance.” These responses, Davis adds, are “socially conditioned” and “politically generated” (12-13). Garland Thomson argues that a nondisabled person, or a normate, is often confused about how s/he should communicate with a disabled person—“whether to offer assistance; whether to acknowledge disability; what words, gestures, or expectations to use or avoid”—but also reduces a “complex person to a single attribute” (Extraordinary 12). In response to the normate’s attitude, the disabled person “must use charm, intimidation, ardor, deference, humor, or entertainment to relieve nondisabled people of 14 their discomfort” (Extraordinary 13). These reactions—such as stigmatization, fear, or avoidance—are shaped by the social, cultural, and political power relations in a society. At this point, Mitchell and Snyder highlight the importance of Foucault’s work for disability studies. Foucault’s research “turns the medical gaze back upon itself” (The Body 19) and questions normalization of bodies through power, in this case, the power of social and medical practices. He coins the term “biopower” to explain why and how the body became a target after the classical age and explains the age of biopower as follows: During the classical period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines— universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “biopower.” (History 140) Biopower, then, forces normalization and creates biopolitical bodies. According to Foucault, the tools of normalization cannot be narrowed down to the constraints imposed by the government. Biopower is exerted and regulated mostly through the medical gaze, and it is embedded in everyday practices. Among them are “normalizing technologies that facilitate the systematic objectivization of subjects as deaf, criminal, mad, and so on, and the techniques of self-improvement and self-transformation such as weight-loss programs and fitness regimes, assertiveness training, botox injections, breast implants, psychotherapy, and rehabilitation” (Tremain 8). These practices create the “illusion” that impairment is “the embodiment of a natural deficit or lack.” Therefore, the category of impairment “rationalizes” and “legitimizes” the acts of normalization (Tremain 11). Through this framework, Foucault’s ideas on the employment of power have provided a perspective for disability studies. In establishing disability theory, academics drew on Foucault’s arguments on normativity, normality, and power to urge critical reflections on biopower. Much of the scholarship in disability studies elaborates on myriad power relations in society that validate the ostracization and oppression of people with disabilities. Not ignoring biological conditions, it addresses the following questions: 15 What is the professional titillation that accompanies the exotic land of dysfunction and biological breakdown? How is the attempt to contain and control the chaotic text of disability integral to modern science’s ability to manufacture itself as normalizing and authoritative? How have disabled populations been used to solidify and secure definitions of the altruistic service and moral commitments of diagnostic disciplines? (Mitchell and Snyder, The Body 19) These questions have become the starting point for problematizing assumptions and misconceptions regarding disability. They expose the cultural, political, and social responses to bodily differences while addressing the power relations circulating within a society. Similar to Foucault, Mary Douglas discusses the rituals of individual and social purification—normalization—in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.7 She defines culture as the “standardized values of a community” which serve as “the authority” in categorizing and shaping the experiences of each citizen (40). The process of social and individual cleansing creates anomalies, what Douglas calls social dirt. According to Douglas, dirt is “essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. . . . Dirt offends against order” (2). In short, dirt can be defined as anything that disrupts the social order. Although these disruptions or anomalies vary in each culture, the way societies deal with them show similarities. Garland Thomson draws an analogy between Douglas’s concept of dirt and Goffman’s stigma theory to claim that “human stigmata function[s] as social dirt.” She explains that dirt “is an anomaly, a discordant element rejected from 7 When body and norms are discussed from Foucault’s perspective, one immediately thinks of Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity and how it renders subjects livable or unlivable. Although her theory seems relevant, few disability studies scholars refer to Butler in their works. In her article “Critical Divides: Judith Butler’s Body Theory and the Question of Disability,” Ellen Samuels traces the use of Butler’s theory on body by disability studies scholars and explains why her work is ignored in this discipline. She explains that there seems to be a tendency towards applying Butler’s ideas to disability theory after 2000, yet most scholars still approach her work critically. Samuels contends that Butler does not address disability in her works—even uses deviant body as a trope. Moreover, exchanging the terms sex or gender with disability is not enough for an in-depth analysis and it might be misleading. However, Samuels also states that as postmodern body theory and disability theory continue to grow, they might overlap, or at least follow parallel tracks in the future (73). Butler’s idea of performativity also appears in crip theory, a type of critical disability theory that focuses on the intersectionality of disability with gender, sexuality, queer studies, temporality, and other frameworks. This dissertation will make use of specific aspects of crip theory (e.g., bodymind, access intimacy, crip knowledge, crip time, crip world-building, stigmaphobia, “cripping up,” and crip language practices) throughout. 16 the schema that individuals and societies use in order to construct a stable, recognizable, and predictable world” (Extraordinary 33). Therefore, societies do not tolerate any disturbance, or anomaly, which they see as “pollution, taboo, contagion” (Extraordinary 34). Garland Thomson also argues that Douglass’s proposition—that there are five ways to respond to the extraordinary—correlates with a society’s responses to disability (Extraordinary 34). According to Douglas, labeling differences—or anomalies—in order to reduce ambiguity is the first strategy (40). Garland Thomson claims, this reduces a complex person to a single trait such as a black, a gay, or a disabled (Extraordinary 34). The second response to “anomaly” is eliminating physical differences. For instance, twins are killed in some West African tribes for it is believed that two babies cannot grow in one womb (Douglas 40). The third option is to avoid anomalies whereas labeling the anomaly as dangerous is another way to respond to differences. Rendering differences as dangerous encourages conformity and helps to create a society comprised of docile bodies. Finally, the last and only constructive approach to anomalies in culture is incorporating differences in rituals to “enrich meaning or to call attention to other levels of existence” (Douglas 40-41). Garland Thomson believes that this approach has the power to alter cultural and literary discourses so disability will be depicted not as deviance or abnormality but as part of culture (Extraordinary 38). Douglas’s elaboration on the ways individuals and societies react to differences requires a return to affect studies since these reactions are rooted in socially and culturally coded affects. In “An Inventory of Shimmers,” Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg define affect as “a gradient bodily capacity. . . that rises and falls not only along various rhythms and modalities of encounter but also through the troughs and sieves of sensation and sensibility, an incrementalism that coincides with belonging to comportments of matter of virtually and every sort” (2). Sara Ahmed, on the other hand, describes it as “what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (“Happy” 29). That is, affect arises from all sorts of encounters and manifests itself in corporeal, sensory, or cognitive engagements. Just like the term affect has multiple definitions, theories of affect also vary, feeding, evolving, diverging from one another. Seigworth and Gregg suggest eight main 17 approaches in affect theory. Although these approaches sometimes differ from one another significantly, they also overlap in literary and cultural analyses. One approach explores “phenomenologies and post-phenomenologies of embodiment” while the other addresses affect in relation to issues such as cybernetics, neurosciences, artificial intelligence (Seigworth and Gregg 6). The third approach is in the field of philosophy which “[links] the movements of matter with a processual incorporeality” whereas psychology and psychoanalysis deal more with the categorization of affects and explore “intersubjective and interobjective systems of social desiring” (7). Addressed by academics and activists working to deconstruct power dynamics, the fifth approach is more political. Their exploration of affect includes analyses of everyday experiences where “repetitious practices of power can simultaneously provide a body. . .with predicaments and potentials for realizing a world that subsists within and exceeds the horizons and boundaries of the norm” (7). The sixth approach engages in “ethico- aesthetic spaces” that are created through interactions with technology, performative and “non-discursive arts” as well as animals and infants (8). The seventh approach to affect is about emotions, exploring the contagiousness of feelings and affects in relation to environment or place. And the final approach is found in scientific practices which “[embrace] pluralist approaches to materialism” (8).8 These various approaches to affect prove its multifaceted qualities. In other words, affect has the potential to be explored as excess, as autonomous, as impersonal, as the ineffable, as the ongoingness of process, as pedagogico-aesthetic, as virtual, as sharable (mimetic), as sticky, as collective, as contingency, as threshold or conversion point, as immanence of potential (futurity), as the open, as a vibrant incoherence that circulates about zones of cliché and convention, as a gathering place of accumulative dispositions. (Seigworth and Gregg 9) The aim of this dissertation is not to pick a side in affect theories, but to use these potentials in conjunction with disability studies since disabled bodies, disability as a term, and theater carries affects that may result in a myriad of emotions and feelings. Deborah B. Gould argues that affects can never be fixed, and they are “unbounded.” Therefore, their movement is “nonpredetermined” by nature (21). This unpredictability 8 Some important names in this field include, but are not limited to, Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, Sara Ahmed, Brian Massumi, Elspeth Probyn, Lauren Berlant, Lisa Blackman, Sianne Ngai, Teresa Brennan, and Silvan Tomkins. 18 gives affects a potential to be transformative. Indeed, Ria Cheyne explains that transformation is an inherent quality of affects. As Cheyne writes: “[A]ffect presupposes some form of transformative experience. . . . Affective and emotional factors are often much more powerful at changing minds and attitudes, and challenging prejudice, than arguments based in reason and logic” (9). Therefore, affect theory intersects with disability studies, which also provides ground to identify feelings regarding disability and points of marginalization. Affects are related both to the body and the mind; likewise, scholars of disability studies reject dualist approaches to body and mind and insist on their inseparability by using the term bodymind.9 As Cheyne explains, “affects always work on the bodymind,” and “the notion of bodymind” is also “implicit within the notion of affect, and vice versa” (9). While the use of disability in literature—and theater within the scope of this dissertation—may please the reader by reiterating the affects of disability, as Cheyne argues, it also has the power to create “an affective conflict” by rupturing typical associations with disability (1). This dissertation will focus on these transformative affects by referring to neoliberalism, disaffection, care work, and abjection. These terms are delineated and discussed in detail at the beginning of each chapter. Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory extends Douglas’s work on dirt and purification, and also aligns with affect theory as abjection is an affective response. While Douglas approaches normalization and responses to difference from an anthropological perspective, Kristeva interprets human behavior through a psychoanalytic and poststructuralist perspective. Her concept of abjection offers another approach to “the other” and therefore to the oppression of the disabled.10 In Powers of Horror: An Essay 9 Margaret Price began using the term “bodymind” in a disability studies context believing that “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other” (“The Bodymind” 269). 10 Drawing on Freud and Lacan’s theories of identity formation, Kristeva explains the psychosexual development of an infant in four steps. The first stage is “the chora” when the baby does not differentiate itself from the mother. Acting solely on its desires and needs, the child does not have the sense of “I” or “the other.” Identifying itself with its mother, the infant is neither the subject nor the object. The second pre-linguistic stage is characterized by abjection during which the baby begins to create borders and separate itself from its mother, who becomes the first abject. Abjection is “our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling.” (Powers of Horror 13). The infant identifies its own image in the third 19 on Abjection, Kristeva defines abjection as “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). According to Kristeva, the abject is not simply the other. Rather, it is “[n]ot me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing” (2). Here, abject is a part of the subject, and is also embodied in the other. In “Wounded/Monstrous/Abject: A Critique of the Disabled Body in the Sociological Imagery,” Bill Hughes explains that the abject “remains a part of the subject, repressed, denied but lurking, hovering, whispering barely audibly from some liminal place in the recesses of the imaginary” (405). Abject, then, is something that blurs the line between the self and the other, which confuses, startles, disturbs and/or frightens an individual who has learnt to understand the world through binary oppositions. Subjects either move toward an object or they withdraw depending on the way they are affected by this object (Ahmed, “Happy” 32). Abjection results from affects that evoke feelings of disgust and fear. As Seigworth and Gregg state, affect marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters or; a world’s belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non-belonging, through all those far sadder (de)compositions of mutual in-compossibilities. Always there are ambiguous or “mixed” encounters that impinge and extrude for worse and for better, but (most usually) in-between. (2) Responses to the abject are triggered by the affects that reveal in-betweenness, which disturbs and deconstructs one’s subjectivity. According to B. Hughes, the abject includes “incest, cannibalism, human sacrifice, perversion, monstrosity, infection, disease, decay, death, and the waste products of the body, all those substances and fluids that might pass from the inner to outer body and that embody the capacity to disgust and repel” (405). Everything that confronts, insults, and humiliates and therefore poses a threat to “the civilized normal” can be abject. Facing the abject is an uncomfortable experience because by “challeng[ing] the coherence of the clean and proper body” it “disrupts normative and dominant representations of embodiment” (B. stage, which Lacan also names as the mirror stage. This is followed by the final stage when the infant enters the symbolic world of language—that is the realm of acculturation, or normalization, thereby repressing its instincts and desires as well as the abject. As the abject is excluded from language, its presence threatens the subject’s identity and strips him/her of language. This means a return to the chora, a chaotic world of desires and needs, which is now alien to the subject and therefore frightening. 20 Hughes 405-406). The affect of abject results in negative emotions and responses because it postpones a subject’s “becoming” by constantly deconstructing and reconstructing it. As Seigworth and Gregg also convey, affect plays a significant role in a body’s “becoming,” which essentially “always [becomes] otherwise” (3). Both affect and abject rise from encounters, the former as the catalyzer and the latter as the outcome. In his article “Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistance,” Josh Dohmen suggests that positioning disability as abject helps explain the non-disabled’s resistance to interaction with disabled individuals and also paves the way out of disability oppression (762). Although Kristeva does not explicitly refer to disability as abject in Powers of Horror, in her essay entitled “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and . . . Vulnerability,” she shows a correlation between the two concepts. She argues that a disabled person is excluded because s/he “opens a narcissistic identity wound in the person who is not disabled; [s]he inflicts a threat of physical or psychical death, fear of collapse, and, beyond that, the anxiety of seeing the very borders of the human species explode” (29). The disabled body is abject because its affect is liminal and problematizes the able-bodied notions of normalcy. It does not conform to standards and transgresses the borders of a normal body. Therefore, a disabled person poses a danger to the social order with their potential to disrupt classification and standardization. The target of disability studies then is to deconstruct and challenge the social, political, historical, economic, and cultural responses to disability. Although disability studies became one of the major areas of research within American sociology departments in the 1970s as a result of the contemporary Disability Rights Movement, it was during the 1990s when literary disability studies emerged as a critical discipline. Disability and the concept of normalcy prevail in literature as they appear in myths, early poems, plays, autobiographies, postmodern novels and contemporary narratives. In his article entitled “The Ambiguities of Inclusion: Disability in Contemporary Literature,” Stuart Murray states that the Disability Rights Movement encouraged writers to write about disability. According to Murray, it was the increasing popularity of memoirs in the 1990s that “created both the space to articulate disability experience and an audience—both disabled and not—for those stories.” However, the enthusiasm to share personal 21 journeys was not limited to the authors of this specific genre. Novelists and playwrights also began to write about the topics which had previously been ignored in the literary world (90). As Murray suggests, most disability narratives are categorized under life writing. In these narratives, ableist culture becomes the target and the disabled subject is portrayed as a person who suffers from ostracism and fights against discrimination (Mitchell and Snyder, The Body 9). Although life writing offers a new perspective to readers regarding the experience of disability, the “misfortunes” of a disabled person remind the able-bodied reader how fortunate s/he is. Such autobiographical works remain “on an individual level” since “social and political contexts tend to be overshadowed by the emotions of pity and/or sympathy” (Mitchell and Snyder, The Body 11). Thus, disability narratives can be a double-edged sword. That is, literature is “both a utilitarian tool of transformation and a medium for further stigmatizing disability in the imaginations of its audience” (Mitchell and Snyder, The Body 13). Despite changes in literary tradition, disabled people can still be misrepresented and their encounters with disability may generate affects that result in an emotional catharsis for readers. Murray also notes that attempts for disability inclusion in literature are commendable, yet simplistic and stereotypical representations of lived experience still dominate (91). The portrayals remain one dimensional since psychological development is ignored, and most characters lack depth. However, as Garland Thomson states, the disability experience is complex as it “can be painful, comfortable, familiar, alienating, bonding, isolating, disturbing, endearing, challenging, infuriating, or ordinary” (Extraordinary 14). Mitchell and Snyder also emphasize that symbolic and metaphorical meanings attributed to disabled bodies strip the disabled of their complex and multidimensional individualities (Narrative 60). Considering that disability is a multifaceted experience, literary disability scholars insist that literature should offer alternative representations rather than depicting disability as a catastrophic condition and disabled people as pitiable figures. Since the emergence of literary disability studies, academics have approached texts from different perspectives. Mitchell and Snyder summarize the methodologies that have been adopted by disability scholars in the humanities as “studies of negative imagery, social realism, new historicism, biographical criticism, and transgressive 22 reappropriation” (Narrative 15). Studies of “negative imagery” first aimed to analyze disability representation in canonical literary works. Those who have traced the negative images of disability argue that texts reflect demeaning attitudes towards disabled people (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative 18). Longmore delineates three strategies which have been used to stereotype people with disabilities. Firstly, disability is explained as “a punishment for evil.” In such narratives, a person becomes disabled as a result of a sinful or immoral act. Secondly, disabled people are resentful and bitter because of their fate. That is, their psychological condition can only be explained by their physical inabilities. Finally, disabled people despise nondisabled people and want to destroy them (“Screening” 67). When analyzing the disabled figure in literature, Garland Thomson also observes that most main characters do not have physical disabilities and characters with disabilities are presented as “uncomplicated figures” or “exotic aliens” whose bodies are objectified and become spectacles (Extraordinary 9). Some examples of such representation are Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Captain Hook in James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan, Quasimodo in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Laura in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (Garland Thomson, Extraordinary 10).11 Mitchell and Snyder also list the metaphoric representations of disability in literature as follows: [T]he crippled Greek god Hephaestus; Montaigne’s sexually potent limping women; Shakespeare’s hunchback’d king, Richard III; Frankenstein’s deformed monster; Bronte’s madwoman in the attic; Melville’s one-legged, monomaniacal Captain Ahab; Nietzsche’s philosophical grotesques; Hemingway’s wounded war veterans; Morrison’s truncated and scarred ex-slaves; Borges’s blind librarians; Oë’s brain-damaged son. (Narrative 16) Murray also traces disability representation back to modernist literature and he states that works such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) illustrate the changes in the perception of mental and physical health, which was shaped by the medical approach to disability (91). Murray analyzes the literature of post-World War II that designated millions of people disabled or “broken” as exemplified in Samuel 11 Ann Fox argues that there is no strict line between the progressive and stereotypical in Tennessee Williams’s works. For example, she analyzes Laura as a character who suffers from medical paternalism and social stigmatization (“Reclaiming” 139). 23 Beckett’s Endgame (1957), Happy Days (1961), Act Without Words (1957), Waiting for Godot (1952) and Molloy (1951). He claims that although these works make use of disability as a metaphor to describe the post-war world, they reflect it as “a norm rather than an exception” (93). In other words, the characters in these works portray the physical and psychological condition of a society after war. The analyses of inaccurate characterization of disabled people have led to a call for social realism. Social realism, which “calls for more realistic depictions,” challenges the biased and deceptive negative imagery in literature. As Mitchell and Snyder express, social realism does not demand romanticized “positive images” instead of the negative. Rather, it requires a depiction of reality as experienced by disabled people such as architectural barriers and the negative attitudes of nondisabled individuals. It is claimed that this will ultimately familiarize society with the experience of disability and decrease alienation (Narrative 21-23). Social realists also argue that disabled people should be the ones to depict their experiences because the images will be more realistic when they are in charge of representing themselves (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative 24). A New Historicist approach to disability representation, on the other hand, has sought “to perform an anthropological unearthing of images that could help to reconstruct a period’s point of view on human variation.” Moreover, new historicists analyze the role of disability in high art, and they define disability as a “product of specific cultural ideologies” (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative 25-26). Historical revisionism has resulted in a search for disabled writers and artists in history. This methodology, called biographical criticism, requires “(1) analyses of critical readings of disability by able- bodied and disabled scholars alike; (2) the analysis of the relationship between literature and medicine; and (3) interpretations by disabled writers of other disability characterizations in history” (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative 30). By reanalyzing the works of chronically ill or disabled writers (among whom are John Milton, Lord Byron, Stephen Crane, and Virginia Woolf), academics aimed to understand the function of disability on creativeness (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative 30). Transgressive reappropriation, the final methodology, refers to embracing discriminatory language used for the disabled. With a desire to force ableist culture to 24 face their own violence, disability rights advocates claim words such as “cripple” or “gimp” to make them part of empowering discourse (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative 35). In her introduction to Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights, Victoria Ann Lewis explains that this tradition started in the 1970s when disabled people “decided to throw off the invisibility cloak of shame and reclaim the negative term ‘disability’ as a badge of pride and power” (xix), much like LGBTQ individuals did with the word queer. These activists argued that the oppression of disability “will not be erased by a more sensitive etiquette” and rejected euphemisms such as “physically challenged” or “differently abled” and advocated for terms such as “disability,” “disabled,” and “people with disabilities” (Lewis, Introduction xx). Mitchell and Snyder contribute to the field with a novel approach and analyze the representation of disability in literature with reference to what they call “narrative prosthesis,” a term they coined to interrogate how a text treats disability. They define narrative prosthesis as follows: “[D]isability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device. We term this perpetual discursive dependency upon disability narrative prosthesis” (Narrative 47). According to Mitchell and Snyder, an actual prosthesis creates an illusion as its function is to compensate for the lacking body part. Here, a prosthesis’s function is to “return one to an acceptable degree of difference” as it gives the impression that the body is a “whole” (Narrative 6-7). A narrative prosthesis, on the other hand, is “about the ways in which the ruse of prosthesis fails in its primary objective: to return the incomplete body to the invisible status of a normative essence” (Narrative 8). They claim that literary texts deal with disability in two ways: the character either overcomes her/his disability or is punished in the end since s/he does not conform to normalization (56). In short, disability functions as a metaphor that indicates a social problem. Garland Thomson also agrees that the disabled body “become[s] semiotic manifestations of social ills, evoking a tangle of empathy and disgust” which makes it difficult for the reader to identify with the characters (Extraordinary 84). According to Mitchell and Snyder, these metaphors appear in literature in a typical pattern. First, “a deviance or marked difference is exposed to the reader.” Second, the narrative addresses the origins and consequences of this deviance. Third, the deviance is situated in the 25 center of the narrative and finally, the deviance is fixed either by a cure, a rescue from social censure, the death of the deviant, or “the reevaluation of an alternative mode of being” (Narrative 53-54). Moreover, disabled characters, who are portrayed as “uncomplicated figures or exotic aliens,” are rarely at the center of a narrative and therefore most main characters are able-bodied (Garland Thomson, Extraordinary 9). What Mitchell and Snyder suggest is that disability is generally used as a symbol or metaphor that connects internal subjectivity with the external body. Narratives are replete with representations that portray the deviant body as a force that “deforms subjectivity” or vice versa. Notable examples of metaphorical meanings attributed to the body are listed in Clare Barker and Stuart Murray’s “Introduction: On Reading Disability in Literature” and are as follows: Shakespeare’s Richard III where Richard’s disability represents villainy and treachery; in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Ahab’s missing leg is the reason why he is obsessed and maniacal; Rochester, who is blind, leads the reader to question romance and care in Jane Eyre; and finally Of Mice and Men reflects on innocence through Lenny’s simplicity (2). Barker and Murray argue that these metaphorical associations are a direct result of ableism. They state that Every character in popular fiction who was understood to be criminal because of, say, a facial disfigurement, or heroic because they challenged the perceived limitations that come with living “confined to” a wheelchair, could now be seen to be the products of ableist cultural assumptions about what kind of body or mind was normal and what were seen to be the terms of any difference from such norms. . . disability is figured as deficit, defined by what it is not, rather than understood as its own mode of being. (4) To change this tradition, Mitchell and Snyder argue that narratives and disability studies should address “the impact of the experience of disability upon subjectivity without simultaneously situating the internal and external body within a strict mirroring relationship to one another” (Narrative 58). They necessitate a rethinking and reevaluating of concepts such as normalcy and disability. Drama has an important place both in literary tradition and in the field of disability studies because a play is both textual and visual. In other words, the stage production of a play is as important as what the text says. In Twenty-First Century American Playwrights, Christopher Bigsby posits that 26 [P]lays have the capacity not merely to move—a pop song can do as much—but to provoke a shock of recognition, to enter into a conversation with those who look for some insight into private and public concerns. Plays can register tremors in the individual psyche or a society whose contradictions, denials, and illusions can be exposed or explored in the theatre as they are often not in the passing traffic of social affairs. (5) Bigsby’s point is that as one of the most influential interpersonal and affective mediums to convey ideas, express emotions and transform societies, theater allows those who seek social justice to challenge dominant ideologies. Theater has the power to resist racial, sexual and economic injustices, rendering it a prominent medium that reveals ableist ideologies and the experiences of the disabled. As Kirsty Johnston argues in Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism, a director’s choice of “play selection, venue, casting, design, marketing, and accessibility” and the representation of the body on stage matters to the “lived disability experience” (2-3). That is, a play constitutes many affective levels, each of which is equally important to the meaning-making process. William B. Worthen states that “theatrical innovation always takes place on three fronts: as technology, as esthetics, and as ideology” (11). Disability in theater challenges conventional aesthetic perceptions and triggers ideological questions regarding the treatment of disability. Similarly, Johnston highlights the significance of disability studies within performance studies because theater, which she defines as both artistic and activist, has the power to subvert stereotypes and stigmatization by blurring aesthetic boundaries (“What” 15). That is, the performative aspect of the text paves the way for more in-depth criticism because how disability is represented on stage also matters. Ann M. Fox and Carrie Sandahl suggest in “Beyond ‘Cripping Up:’ An Introduction” that “[t]he crafting of language by playwrights is a particular and unique opportunity for carefully shaped narratives to intersect with embodied performance” (121). Fox and Sandahl share Johnston’s argument that the director’s decisions regarding how—and why—to perform a play are of great importance to the experience of disability. In another article titled “Fabulous Invalids Together: Why Disability in Mainstream Theater Matters,” Fox discusses the position of disability in theater as follows: “I must acknowledge that commercial theater has done damage to disabled people: the popular 27 has been the site of disability minstrelsy, the appropriation of disabled roles/characters by nondisabled people, and the reinscription of troubling narratives” (124-125). Therefore, disability theater aims to play with the conventions regarding representation of bodies on stage. It also portrays various ways that disability culture deals with ableism. Johnston articulates that disability theater does not follow a single pattern in production but reproduces and “re-imagin[es]” disability in different contexts. Emphasizing the literary and performative aspect of theater, she states that some artists “have sought to highlight specific disability experiences while others favor kinds of performance that lie outside the scope of theatre’s more traditional framings” (“What” 35). Within this framework, contemporary American drama has welcomed notable playwrights who present disability and its complexities more progressively than their predecessors. This dissertation will also make use of the plays of such playwrights to reveal whether or not they free disability from its metaphorical connotations and contribute to disability culture. Bigsby asserts that twenty-first century American theater differs greatly from the previous century when theater was dominated by notable playwrights. He defines the new age as follows: This is not a period in which there are dominant voices, no O’Neill, Miller, Williams, who in a mere eleven years, from 1945 to 1956, produced a series of classics of the American theatre that have not been equalled. Such periods are rare in the history of not only American but world theatre. What there are, are writers from a wide range of backgrounds who together are in the process of defining America in the twenty-first century, sometimes choosing to invoke the past as guide and warning, sometimes confronting present realities, all seeing in the theatre an art in which actor and audience inhabit the same time, breathe the same air, see on the stage and reflect in themselves a sense of community always under threat but always yearned for. (3-4) As Bigsby asserts, contemporary playwrights help define what it means to be an American in the new century, which began with traumatic events such as 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. Some playwrights have become the voice of those who were traumatized by the catastrophic experiences. Others have been dramatizing the effects of the social, political and cultural changes that the twentieth century brought. No matter where they stand, they all help shape the new century’s culture and understanding. 28 Since there are numerous prolific playwrights, this dissertation offers only a glimpse into twenty-first century drama by focusing on the first two decades of the century. Moreover, the experience of disability can be considered through a wide range of spectra. Therefore, to narrow down the scope of research, this dissertation will shed light on the change in contemporary drama’s approach to disability in terms of its role in the American family. Since American dramatists have always problematized the family unit in their works, this dissertation will contribute to the field by analyzing contemporary dramas about American family life through the lens of disability. Despite American society’s glorification of the perfect family, writers and playwrights have criticized this myth by portraying dysfunctional family dynamics in their works. Death, hypocrisy, incest, racial and sexual violence, blame, guilt, and denial have become the main themes of family dramas, negotiating identity, morality and pipe dreams that shape families. The discussion of the American family can be traced back to Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1845) and even to George L. Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Although these plays are not categorized as family dramas, they offer different perspectives on American life and families. The main dramas that focus on the American family emerged in the twentieth century. The most notable family plays of the first half of the era are Clifford Odet’s Awake and Sing (1935), Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1939), Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into the Night (1956). Sam Shepard’s family dramas dominate the second half of the twentieth century with plays such as Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979), True West (1980), and A Lie of the Mind (1985). Other examples include but are not limited to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Edward Albee’s The American Dream (1961) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), August Wilson’s Fences (1986), and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997). In the twentieth century, the two-parent nuclear family was glorified and conformity to normative standards was assumed. They were also expected to follow the American Dream rather than their own desires and dreams. Each of these works deconstructs the family myth and challenges the idea of family as a monolith. 29 Few of these major dramas deal with the role of disability in familial relationships except for the plays of Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams. Shepard approaches disability from a traditional perspective and mostly uses it as a metaphor for the loss of masculinity or innocence. On the other hand, Williams discusses disability from different perspectives since he personally witnessed the social stigmatization of disability. Williams can be considered to be one of the first playwrights in American theater to integrate disability into the recurring theme of family and to stand against the tyranny of the normal.12 The playwrights of the twenty-first century maintain tradition, yet they also address family dynamics, which are redefined in contemporary America. Irene Goldenberg, Mark Stanton and Herbert Goldenberg argue in Family Therapy: An Overview that the families of the twenty-first century differ significantly from traditional definitions of the previous era since “living arrangements,” “styles of living,” or “organizational patterns” vary in contemporary families: There are further divisions and complexities within each type of family structure, brought about by early or later marriages, interracial coupling, foster parenting, informal kinship adoptions, social class position. . . [Therefore] an inclusive 21st- century definition of family must go beyond traditional thinking to include people who choose to spend their lives together in a kinship relationship despite the lack of legal sanctions or bloodlines. (3) As the quote expresses, families in the twenty-first century are diverse, and they may consist of single parents, long term partners who never marry and live together, same sex partners, and so on. Raphael J. Becvar and Dorothy S. Becvar also define family in Systems Theory and Family Therapy: A Primer as “being whatever one experiences it as being” (69). David Auburn’s Proof (2000), Susan Lori-Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2001), Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (2007), Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (2009), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate (2013), and Richard Nelson’s The Apple Family Plays (2010-13) deal with familial relationships but are beyond the scope of this dissertation. Eight plays written and performed in the first two decades of the twenty-first century will be analyzed in this dissertation to explore their approaches to disability and the 12 A term used by Leslie Fiedler as a title to his essay and book. 30 American family—Pyretown (2004), A Nervous Smile (2006), and The Rules of Charity (2007) by John Belluso; Good People (2011) by David Lindsay Abaire; The Humans (2016) by Stephen Karam; Cost of Living (2018) by Martyna Majok; Mary Jane (2018) by Amy Herzog; and Amy and the Orphans (2019) by Lindsey Farrentino. To specify, single mothers with disabled children, care work, and abandoned disabled children will be at the center of this study. These works are not the only plays that portray disability since 2000, but have been selected for specific reasons. The plays of Amy Herzog, David Lindsay Abaire, Stephen Karam and Martyna Majok have either won or have been nominated for awards. Lindsey Ferrentino’s play, on the other hand, is considered a barrier breaker since a person with Down Syndrome was included in the cast, as the leading role, for the first time. Finally, John Belluso, who is a prolific disabled playwright and an activist, is considered to be a spokesperson of the Disability Rights Movement. He claims disability as an identity, and deliberately prioritizes the experience of disability in his work. Therefore, a play by Belluso is discussed in each chapter. Like their predecessors, these playwrights disconnect the family unit from the concepts of security and comfort in different contexts. Since they problematize the so- called “problem of disability” in the realist mode, this dissertation will refer to their works as “problem plays of the twenty-first century.” Eileen J. Herrmann points out that Henrik Ibsen contributed to the rise of realism with “social problem plays” that brought humanity and society in question. Herrmann explains that Ibsen focused on the “truths” of his Norwegian bourgeois society and the institutions upon which those truths rested (church, civil life, law). . . . Absent both villains and heroes, Ibsen’s plays create characters who need to be rescued from the social and moral system. His questioning is metaphorical, unlimited by time or place, applicable to any society that demands conformity to its values, suppresses the individual and sets up barriers against living. (510) Ibsen’s style inspired many American dramatists, among whom are “Sophie Treadwell, James A. Herne, Rachel Crothers, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, David Mamet, and Wendy Wasserstein” (Herrmann 510). The twenty-first century playwrights whose works are analyzed in this dissertation also draw heavily on realism, specifically social problem plays, to expose injustices and misdeeds prevailing in American society. 31 George Bernard Shaw defines problem plays as follows: A problem play addresses social questions “produced by the conflict of human institutions with human feeling…. the material of the dramatist is always some conflict of human feeling with circumstances; so that, since institutions are circumstances, every social question furnishes material for drama” (58-59). Henry F. Salerno argues that problem plays present social and political institutions as the reason for human suffering: All in all, the aesthetics of the problem play, as it came to be developed in the transnational period, involve the use of well-made play techniques, the employment of the realistic style; the development of character and of human emotion in conflict with social values, mores and institutions; the presentation of controversial or socially taboo questions for dramatic exploration; the attempt at an objective or at least open-minded treatment of the social problem; the attempt to see the individual in his relation to the total society or a stratum of that society; the attempt, if not to offer a solution to the problem, at least to so clarify the problem as to point to a solution, or to effect a greater awareness of the problem and its consequences. (201) Although problem plays are conventional in style, the issues they address are anything but unorthodox (Worthen 5). Most importantly, they ask for a redefinition of the established social order. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, for example, is a well-made play, yet the subject matter was scandalous for the middle class of the time because the play questions and ch