Disabled Bodies as the Uncanny

Abstract

This paper first examines how society marginalizes and discriminates against disability and people with disabilities, treating them as the uncanny. It then delves into the roots of anxieties and fears surrounding disability based on the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan. Specifically, it seeks to understand why and how encountering disability, through the lens of psychoanalytic theories, can produce an experience of the uncanny in non-disabled people. Subsequently, this paper discusses how the notion of the uncanny is now politically employed by autobiographical writers with disabilities to question the boundaries between the familiar and the unfamiliar, or the normal and the abnormal. Ultimately, based on Julia Kristeva’s idea of foreignness within ourselves, this study seeks to explore how we can embrace the uncanny nature of disability as an integral part of our identities and lives.