Revising Gerty MacDowell’s Identity and Agency: An Intersectional Feminist Disability Perspective

Abstract

Gerty MacDowell’s initial, albeit brief, appearance in James Joyce’s Ulysses has sparked debates regarding her identity and agency. In the critical literature, there are interpretations that characterize Gerty as a woman and disabled person whose actions conform to patriarchal beauty standards that objectify her. This paper argues for revising such readings by applying an intersectional feminist disability perspective attuned to the interconnections between her womanhood and disability. Rather than positing Gerty’s identities as inherently conflicting, I illustrate how her disability and feminine social position co-constitute and transform one another. Her self-care practices aimed at securing a husband, though partly conforming to norms, also foster confidence and counter pervasive cultural assumptions of disabled women as ugly, useless, and asexual. Gerty’s exhibition of sexual desire and pursuit of pleasure likewise contest views of disabled women as unsuitable for romance or unable to be agentic sexual subjects. Furthermore, conceptualizing agency beyond neoliberal notions of rational autonomy acting against all constraints upholds Gerty’s agentic power. She makes strategic use of available discourses and resources to expand her precarious options given material and ideological limitations. Overall, analyzing Gerty’s intersectional experience denaturalizes the reductive models of identity and agency that have dominated Ulysses criticism. Applying fresh perspectives opens new symbolic interpretations of embodied identity and sexuality.