Cripping the Creature

Abstract

The article suggests that we “crip” monsters by reading their weaknesses as disabilities when measured (as all disabilities are) against a culturally constructed standard of a normate human body. As a case study, the article offers an analysis of the mental, moral, and spiritual disabilities of the vampiric body in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ; the suggestion being that the novel’s compulsion (and ultimate failure) thoroughly to “Otherize” the monster springs from anxieties about the somatic links between vampires and their human prey/progeny, which reveals the artificiality of many criteria used to evaluate humans and vampires. The claim in this reading is that the uncomfortable similarities between human and vampiric embodiment and the competition for white human women as a site of reproduction raise questions about the relative fitness of the human and vampire races for survival. Presenting disability in monstrous bodies destabilizes notions of the normate human body as the ideal form of embodiment and unsettles human notions of what constitutes fitness for survival in ways that may enable a productive discourse at the intersection of disability and monster studies, despite the troubled history of these two labels.