Broken bodies as agents : disability aesthetics and politics in modern Chinese culture and literature

This dissertation, "Broken Bodies as Agents: Disability Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Chinese Culture and Literature, " brings together modern China studies and critical disability studies. Drawing upon political and moral philosophy, literary and cultural studies, critical theory, and anthropology, it probes the narrative and symbolic centrality of disability in the Chinese political-moral imagination of the long twentieth century. It tracks the hegemonic establishment, following the birth of the modern Chinese nation-state when the scientific-medical paradigm gains currency, of what can be called the ideology of ability (or simply ableism); the cultural and symbolic fascination with the disabled body indexes the processes in which a normative collective articulates its moral identity and eases its political anxiety. Yet the dissertation seeks to reconstruct disability in political, rather than pathological, terms, critically examining the manners in which the disabled body figures at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The various chapters of the dissertation develop a genealogy of "Chinese crip figures" in transnational contexts: the woman figure with bound feet in imperial China, the madman in Lu Xun's national allegory, the "castrated" male subject in Xiao Hong's subversive novel, the sublime crip figure of Pavel in revolutionary China, the "supercrip" hero from Taiwan, the autobiographical subject in Shi Tiesheng's writings, the mute protagonist in Mo Yan's novella, the sexually impotent brother in Yu Hua's family saga, the autistic boy in post-Mao cinema, and the disabled poet in the age of Internet literature. Theorizing disability not as a mechanically social constructionist account but rather as a dialectically material-semiotic network of social relations and embodied subjects, I argue that disability serves to reify the ableist and often masculinist project of Chinese national sovereignty; since its inception the Chinese nation-state has been shaped by biomedical and eugenic logics and premised upon a fantasy for a healthy, able body politic. Painting expansive historical brushstrokes while focusing on post-Mao China, the dissertation identifies the 1980s as a pivotal bio-political moment when disability becomes institutionalized as a statist identity through the spearhead of the China Disabled Persons' Federation (canlian), whose rhetoric of state benevolence, however, has over time got shortchanged by the neo-liberal narrative of independence. I place disability in intersectional dialogue with such categories as gender, sexuality, race, and class. Moreover, I situate China transnationally (e.g. in the context of the United Nations' disability rights initiatives) and comparatively (e.g. in comparison with Taiwan). Not only does the dissertation excavate the Chinese genealogy of disability so as to shed light on Chinese political and moral modernity, but also by critiquing the representational schemes of disability it probes into the ethical implications for disability justice. Theoretically, the dissertation seeks to engage two significant turns in literary and cultural studies—namely, the affective and the ethical—by foregrounding disability as a mode of critique. It particularly examines "disability aesthetics, " that is, how the disabled body in our cultural imaginaries evokes affective responses and precipitates representational crises—whereby causing what Ato Quayson calls "aesthetic nervousness." Furthermore, it explores the ways in which disability opens up new ethical horizons because its excessively corporeal and often spectacularized embodiment conceptually and aesthetically challenges how a culture defines what it means to be human, thus marking what Martha Nussbaum calls the "frontiers of justice." It uses disability as a critical framework in order to challenge the autonomous liberal subject and posit an ethic of care that recognizes human finitude, vulnerability, and mutual dependence. Finally, the dissertation aims for a methodological intervention by at once drawing upon Euro-American disability studies and, through the comparative lens of Chinese histories and narratives of disability, actually questioning the ideological assumptions of disability studies as it has been developed by Euro-American scholars.

Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Advisor: Lee Haiyan 
Wang Ban
Kohrman Matthew
Menon Jisha
Sang Tze-lan Deborah